Re: QUESTION-New project
| From: | Tim Smith <timsmith@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, February 14, 1999, 3:15 |
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At 08:40 PM 2/12/99 -0800, Jim Grossman wrote:
>JimG -- Say, for those like me who came in late, could you illustrate your
>statements with nonce-examples with English lexemes? I want to know more
>about proximate vs. obviative, applicatives, direct/inverse marking, the
>promotion of NP's to direct object status, etc.? This help will make and
>other listers very grateful. :-)
>
>Jim
Thanks for your interest! It seems like a lot of people have just recently
rejoined the list. So I think what I'm going to do is just quote, verbatim,
big chunks of my previous posts on this. I'm not sure it will all make
sense (I was trying to be clear without being overly verbose, which doesn't
come easily to me), so if anything is unclear, please feel free to say so.
On 1/3/99, I wrote:
The idea that precipitated this, the central new idea around which the old
ideas are coalescing, is that I think I've figured out how to use
proximate/obviative marking on 3rd-person noun phrases and direct/inverse
marking on verbs not only to distinguish between agents and patients of
transitive verbs (as in the Algonquian languages) but also, in combination
with word order, to mark topic and focus. The basic idea is to start with
the same basic word order as Tokana, which I've always found very appealing
(underlying verb-initial, with both topic- and focus-fronting in main
clauses), and add to that the rule that fronted proximates are interpreted
as topical and fronted obviatives as focal. It gets more complicated for
topics and foci that are 1st- or 2nd-person (and thus neither proximate nor
obviative) or aren't NPs at all (prepositional phrases, adverbs, etc.), and
for subordinate clauses (which must remain verb-initial), but I've already
got a rough idea how to deal with these problems. (In other words, I've
given it enough thought to satisfy myself that it's complicated enough to be
interesting but not too complicated to be doable.)
For those of you who may be wondering what proximate/obviative and
direct/inverse marking are, the basic idea is that there's a hierarchy of NP
types, with (in the Algonquian languages) 2nd person at the top, then 1st
person, then 3rd person at the bottom. (In some other language families
that use this kind of system, 1st person is above 2nd person, but they're
both always higher than 3rd person.) If there's more than one 3rd-person
argument in a clause, one of them is proximate (roughly, the one that's most
topical) and the others are obviative, with proximate being higher in the
hierarchy. (In the Algonquian family, this distinction is explicitly marked
in the noun morphology; in some others it's determined by word order and/or
context.) A transitive verb is morphologically marked as either direct or
inverse. If it's direct, of the two core arguments, the one higher on the
hierarchy is interpreted as the subject or agent, and the lower one as the
object or patient; if it's inverse, it's the other way around. There's
somebody on this list (I think Laurie Gerholz) who could tell you more about
how this works in the Algonquian family; there's also at least one other
conlang, Dirk Elzinga's Tepa, that uses this kind of system.
One potential problem with this system is that, for a transitive verb with
two 3rd-person arguments, the system only works if at least one of the
arguments (the subject or the direct object) is proximate. I'm not sure how
Algonquian languages handle the situation where some other NP (an oblique
object) is more topical than either of the two core arguments, but I'm
borrowing something from the Bantu languages: a set of verbal derivational
processes called applicatives, that turn indirect or oblique (prepositional)
objects into direct objects. I'm also using applicatives for
relative-clause formation, because I'm using a method of relativizing that
only works for subjects and direct objects.
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And on 1/19/99, I wrote (in response to a query from Kristian Jensen about
my use of applicatives in forming relative clauses):
In order to be topicalized, a third-person noun phrase must be
marked as proximate, and in order to be marked as proximate, it
must be either a subject or a primary object. This follows from
the requirements that: (1) either the subject or the primary
object _must_ be proximate (otherwise there would be no way to
distinguish between them); and (2) there can only be one
proximate NP per clause. Thus, the underlying function of
applicatives, which promote non-primary objects to primary-object
status, is to allow non-primary objects to be topicalized. As I
see it, there is a strong relationship, at some level of
abstraction, between topicalization and relativization, because
the relativized NP (the head of the relative clause) is in some
sense the "topic" of the relative clause. It therefore makes
intuitive sense to me that the same restrictions that apply to
topics should also apply to heads of relative clauses, and that
the same means should be used to circumvent these restrictions
(namely applicatives). One of the things that's esthetically
pleasing to me about this grammar is that this underlying,
abstract similarity between topicalization and relativization is
overtly manifested in the surface structure.
[Note: This grammar distinguishes between primary and secondary
objects rather than between direct and indirect objects. A
primary object can loosely be defined as the direct object of a
monotransitive verb or the indirect object of a ditransitive
verb, and a secondary object as the direct object of a
ditransitive verb. In the English sentence "the man gave the
woman the book", "the woman" is the primary object and "the book"
is the secondary object, whereas in "the man read the book", "the
book" is the primary object and there is no secondary object.]
To illustrate this, let's take a simple sentence from my new and
still nameless conlang:
en t'ai kharash et sei zat tuval ("the man met the woman at the
house")
In this and the subsequent examples, I'm using the following
lexical and grammatical morphemes:
Determiners:
en (definite 3rd-person singular proximate)
et (definite 3rd-person singular obviative)
Nouns:
t'ai (man)
sei (woman)
Verb stem:
kharash (meet)
Verbal prefixes:
Subordination:
a- (relative clause)
Person/number agreement:
0- (both arguments are 3rd person singular)
Modality:
0- (realis)
Tense:
0- (non-anterior)
Aspect:
0- (perfective)
Orientation:
0- (direct)
sa- (inverse)
Applicative:
ze- (location -> primary object)
Preposition:
za (at)
The phonology and orthography, and hence the lexicon, are very
tentative, so I'm not going to say anything about them here.
So the sample sentence above can be glossed as follows (ignoring
categories that aren't relevant to the issue at hand):
en t'ai kharash et sei za-et tuval
PROX man met OBV woman at-OBV house
[Interjection, 2/13/99: I should have said explicitly here that what marks
"the man" as the subject and "the woman" as the direct object in this
sentence is the fact that the verb is marked as direct rather than inverse;
this means that the proximate noun phrase is the subject and the obviative
NP is the object. Inverse marking on the verb (making it _sakharash_
instead of _kharash_) would make it the other way around.]
Here the topic is _en t'ai_ ("the man") and there is no focus.
It's the proximate determiner _en_, not the sentence-initial
position, that marks this noun phrase as the topic. We could
instead put a non-topic before the verb:
et sei kharash en t'ai zat tuval
et sei kharash en t'ai za-et tuval
OBV woman met PROX man at-OBV house
This sentence has the same truth-value "meaning" as the previous
one, and "the man" is still the topic, but now _et sei_ ("the
woman") is the focus, so a better translation would be "the man
met the WOMAN at the house" or "it was the WOMAN that the man met
at the house". Putting an obviative NP before the verb marks it
as the focus, whereas a proximate NP is the topic regardless of
its position. We could also focus an oblique (prepositional)
object in the same way:
zat tuval kharash en t'ai et sei
za-et tuval kharash en t'ai et sei
at-OBV house met PROX mai OBV woman
("The man met the woman at the HOUSE" or "It was at the HOUSE
that the man met the woman.")
It's also possible for both the topic and the focus to be
fronted, in which case the topic goes first:
en t'ai et sei kharash zat tuval
en t'ai et sei kharash za-et tuval
PROX man OBV woman met at-OBV house
But this doesn't happen very often. The normal constituent order
in main clauses is verb-second, and there are constraints on when
it's possible to deviate from this order, although I haven't
figured out exactly what those constraints are. My intuitive
sense is that there are "strong topics" and "weak topics", and
that a strong topic is always fronted, but a weak topic is
fronted only if there's no focus. But I haven't determined
exactly what makes a topic strong (that is, what makes its
topicality salient enough to override the tendency to put only
one constituent before the verb). A contrastive topic is
definitely strong, but there may be other kinds of strong topics
as well. At any rate, this sentence means something like, "As
for the man, it was the WOMAN that he met at the house."
In all the examples so far, the proximate NP is the subject. We
know this because the verb is marked as direct rather than
inverse. Direct orientation means that the subject is higher
than the primary object on the "topic-worthiness" hierarchy (2nd
person -> 1st person -> 3rd person proximate -> 3rd person
obviative); inverse orientation means the opposite. If we want
the primary object to be the topic, we mark it as proximate and
the subject as obviative, and we mark the verb as inverse:
en sei sakharash et t'ai zat tuval
en sei sa- kharash et t'ai za-et tuval
PROX woman INV-met OBV man at-OBV house
This is probably best translated by the English passive voice,
one of whose functions is to topicalize the patient: "The woman
was met by the man at the house."
But (here's where it gets complicated) what if we want "the
house" to be the topic? As an oblique object, it can't be made
proximate. There can only be one proximate NP per clause, and it
has to be either the subject or the primary object; otherwise
there would be no way to distinguish the subject from the primary
object. The answer is to use an applicative: in this case, one
that promotes the location from oblique object to primary object
and (since there can only be one primary object) demotes the
original primary object to secondary object. Thus, as an
intermediate step, we get:
en t'ai zekharash et tuval et sei
en t'ai ze- kharash et tuval et sei
PROX man APPL-met OBV house OBV woman
There isn't really a good way to translate this into English, but
it's something like "The man met-at the house the woman." From
here, we can mark the primary object as proximate, the subject as
obviative, and the verb as inverse, giving:
en tuval sazekharash et t'ai et sei
en tuval sa- ze- kharash et t'ai et sei
PROX house INV-APPL-met OBV man OBV woman
("At the house the man met the woman.")
In these last two sentences, unlike any of the previous examples,
we have to rely partly on word order to disambiguate syntactic
roles. The rule is that when two obviative NPs are immediate
constituents of a clause (that is, arguments of the verb rather
than objects of prepositions, possessors of other NPs, or
whatever), they go in the order: subject -> primary object ->
secondary object.
(One point that I perhaps haven't made clear is that there are
many applicative affixes, one for promoting each of a wide range
of non-primary objects to primary-object status: one for
locations, one for beneficiaries, one for instruments, etc.
They're sort of like the trigger-role-marking affixes in
languages like Tagalog, in that they specify the semantic role of
the affected NP.)
Now, finally, we come to relative clauses, which is what this was
originally supposed to be about. A relative clause is basically
a sentence with the relativizing prefix _a-_ attached to its verb
and with its topic (its proximate NP) deleted. Thus, "the man
who met the woman at the house" is:
en/et t'ai akharash et sei zat tuval
en/et t'ai a- kharash et sei za-et tuval
PROX/OBV man REL-met OBV woman at-OBV house
Here, "the man" is the NP that would have been the topic of the
relative clause if the relative clause had been a full sentence.
We don't know whether it's proximate or obviative because that
depends entirely on its role in the matrix clause, which has
nothing to do with its role in the relative clause.
A primary object can be relativized in the same way:
en/et sei asakharash et t'ai zat tuval
("the woman that the man met at the house")
en/et sei a- sa- kharash et t'ai za-et tuval
PROX/OBV woman REL-INV-met OBV man at-OBV house
But you can't relativize an NP that's neither a subject nor a
direct object. In order to say "the house where the man met the
woman", we have to use an applicative form of the verb to make
"the house" the primary object, so that it can take the proximate
(topical) role within the relative clause:
en/et tuval asazekharash et t'ai et sei
en/et tuval a- sa- ze- kharash et t'ai et sei
PROX/OBV house REL-INV-APPL-met OBV man OBV woman
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I hope this makes sense.
- Tim
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net
The human mind is inherently fallible. It sees patterns where there is only
random clustering, overestimates and underestimates odds depending on
emotional need, ignores obvious facts that contradict already established
conclusions. Hopes and fears become detailed memories. And absolutely
correct conclusions are drawn from completely inadequate evidence.
- Alexander Jablokov, _Deepdrive_ (Avon Books, 1998, p. 269)