Bhavani Saravanan, SUNY Stony Brook
In this paper, I argue that the tense inflection patterns of Tamil verbs are entirely predictable and that Tamil verb stems can be divided into stems that end in a consonant and stems that end in a vowel; the tense inflection patterns of the verbs in Tamil can be predicted based on this classification. I further propose that verbal stems like the participle and infinitive are built on the imperative stem and that the three tense stems are built on these three stems: the future on the imperative sten, the present on the infinitive and past on the participle stem. Here I do not mean to say that the future, present and past tenses are constructed on the actual infinitives, participles or imperatives itself, rather that the tense stems and the other stems are built on common , underlying (in the sense of Bloomfield (1933:209)) stems which I will refer to as the infinitive , participle and imperative stems.
This proposal is built on Matthews` (1991) lexeme based morphology, developed further in Aronoff (1994) in which he argues that two (or more) semantically diametrically opposite stems may be formed on an underlying stem that is semantically (i.e. morphosyntactically) neutral. That is, the active and the passive may both be formed on the same underlying stem that is neither active nor passive. The paper focusses on data from the colloquial dialect of Tamil spoken by middle class Brahmins in Madras