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Re: new parts of speech/cases

From:Kala Tunu <kalatunu@...>
Date:Friday, May 3, 2002, 11:27
Tim May <butsuri@...>
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This is very interesting, but I don't think your examples "The cat eats the mouse" vs "The cat eats at the mouse" works in English. "eats at" sounds more like an abbreviated form of "eats away at", which is more a matter of the action being prolonged in time - durative aspect maybe. <<< actor A's dynamic state causing actor B's state to change may be considered as focusing on either A's state or on B's state. of course all linguists would say that "the mouse" is a PATIENT, not a "focus". RM tries to cram all possible combinations of core roles into a single trinity. where linguists see a "subject", an "undergoer", an "experiencer", a "topic", a "result" or whatever, RM sees only "patients" and "focuses". the traditional way to explain "endocentric" vs. "exocentric" is to give the example of intransitive vs. transitive verbs and explain that "to eat" can be either transitive or intransitive: "i'm eating" vs. "i eat something"--but that's not quite right like your own example shows "to read a book to someone": "to read a book" focuses on the reader's activity to "absorb" the message written in the book (this is endocentric) while "to read to someone" aims at indirectly changing another actor's state by prompting his listening activity (this is exocentric). of course "to read" is polysemic: it means "to peruse written information" as well as "to transfer written information by telling it". RM has managed to take this into account in his system by classifying the subject of a dynamic state verb as a "patient", but a dynamic state verb may change the state of another actor like "to beat (up) the cat" vs. "she beats the drum to the music". in a way, dubbing the patient "mouse" of the verb "to eat" a "focus" looks contrived, but on the other hand it takes into account the fact that the respective natures of "to smash a mouse" and "to eat a mouse" are quite different. the difference is that "to eat a mouse" implies preexisting relations between food and eater: you say "my food" but you don't say "my smashed".
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I myself was unsatisfied with certain aspects of Morneau's scheme, which seem to be related to this. He divides verbs into those which focus on the state of the patient, and those that focus on the action of the agent. I felt that what he refers to as "patient" should always be the location of the focus, thus turning action verbs into state verbs where the "state" is that of performing an action. <<< final "location" of a focus with some verbs like "to plant trees in the garden", "to give the woman a present". but compare what about "to build a house out of bricks", "to grind cereal into flour", etc. the role of "patient" or "focus" depends entirely on semantics. "tree" and "garden" have a special semantic relation, "woman" and "present" a (looser) one, "brick" and "house", "cereal" and "flour" still another one. you pick either as "patient" or "focus" according to semantic relations (part of it, usually in it, transformed into, etc.)
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What Morneau calls the patient of an action verb, I designated the "target" - something the patient is affecting, or trying to affect, the state of, but whose state is not specified. The Agent, then, can be defined as the cause of the state (of the patient) defined by the verb. This all has the effect of making the system partly ergative, I think, although I may be confused here. <<< i do the same as you do but i tag this on the verb as voices: "to cut something" is "to make something cut(ted)" while "to break something" is "to make something break (itself)". this is because "to cut" is fundamentally exocentric while "to break" is fundamentally endocentric ("intransitive") for purely semantic reasons. and you're right, the first one is ergative and the second is factitive but ergative langs like Basque would tag both as ergatives. actors combine with each other in a time frame, with or without a purpose. putting everything up together takes no less than a language ;-) "volition", "aspect", "dynamics", "goal", "transformation", whatever etc. are vectors you can take into account to build your case system and tell the difference between "to play the piano" and "to play the music", etc. personally, i've tried to tag this on actors, then used verb affixes because "one tag on the verb usually spares two on actors" :-) this is completely a matter of taste.
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One advantage of this system is that it clears up the problem mentioned by Morneau in this section: !It's important to emphasize that, when dealing with action concepts, we !cannot treat AP derivations as we did with state verbs. In an AP state !derivation, the agent is causing itself to experience the state that !normally applies only to the patient. <<< see: that's biased. i could call this a PA system and write: "the patient is applying to another patient the state he usually is himself in." japanese "mediopassive" verbs work like that a lot but IALists are very fond of "reflexivity".
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In an AP action derivation, the !agent is causing the patient to perform the action that is normally !performed only by the agent. ! !In other words, in an AP state derivation, the agent EXPERIENCES the !same thing (i.e. state) as the patient. In an AP action derivation, the !patient DOES the same thing (i.e. action) as the agent. ! !Thus, an AP-s version of a verb such as "to kick" does NOT mean that the !agent kicks himself. Instead, it means that the agent is simply !"kicking"; i.e., he is involved in the activity of "kicking" with no !specified or discernible target. This is a subtle distinction, but it !is an extremely important one. <<< this is a typical endocentric/exocentric distinction. same as the difference between "the wood is burning" vs. "the amber burns the wood" vs. "the man burns down the house".
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In my revision, an "AP-s" becomes simply "P-s", as nothing is being stated to cause anything (explicitly). <<< well yeah, in the whole of this thread we did not refer to RM's volitional tag meaning "don't shoot me, i'm a patient but still i am a patient on purpose!" allowing to dub as "patients" the linguistic real world's roles of "experiencer", "undergoer", "subject", etc. your dropping the "Agent" part of the tag doesn't hurt.
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I'm not sure how this helps us with the cat and the mouse, though. Endocentrically, the cat is patient (and maybe agent too), and the mouse is either target or focus or maybe both (this is the thing I'm not happy with in my little system - the difference between target and focus is not all that clear to me). Maybe target if the cat is trying to eat the mouse, "biting at", that kind of thing, and I guess both for normal usage. Exocentrically I don't know, cat agent and focus of passivized "to eat", with mouse as patient? "The cat causes the mouse to be eaten by it (the cat)"? The more I think about this, the less clear I am on what "endocentric" and "exocentric" mean. It's quite possible that I've completely failed to understand your argument. <<< strange: when i read the above i feel like you understand it better than i do myself :-) Once again i'd say that actor A's dynamic state causing actor B's state to change may be considered as focusing on A's state or on B's state. this "actor" could be called whatever "patient", "agent", "experiencer", etc you name it.
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But anyway, I'd be interested to hear what you think about my changes to RM's system. It does add one more case, perhaps unnecessarily. <<< well, given that (i) tagging all possible core roles according to all possible kinds of predicates is difficult (which is why grammatical cases exist), and that (ii) RM's system tries to artificially reduce all possible core roles to a trilogy,--then i'd say that (iii) changing RM's system is always OK and (iv) keeping it as it is makes perfect sense as well :-)) basically it depends on what you want to do with your conlang. personally, i've been using RM's system for a while because it's fun to make everything into three roles but i soon got tired trying to figure out what's the focus of what and i switched to an exo/endo system.
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You seem to be a deep thinker on such matters, although I often find your posts difficult to understand. <<< well, erm, i'm just reading basic books and trying to spend as little time as possible thinking and posting about this all so for sure it's messy and certainly often wrong :-) i am impressed that you read RM long stuff and take the time to read my posts as well. i have a great time discussing this matter with you. mathias _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com