Re: new parts of speech/cases

Kala Tunu writes:

 > By doing so, Rick Morneau tries to neutralize what french linguists call
 > "the direction of the relation between an entity and its behaviour": at the
 > sentence level, the entity is the base actor (let's call it improperly
 > "subject") and the behaviour is the predicate (let's call it wrongly
 > "verb"). There are "attributive" relations between the subject and the verb
 > called "endocentric" because the verb "focuses inwards on the subject's
 > state" and "active" relations called "exocentric" because they focuses on an
 > object's state. "The cat eats the mouse" is endocentric because the
 > direction is really from the mouse to the cat, or said in other words, the
 > state focused at is the cat's state, not the mouse's state. "The cat eats at
 > the mouse" is exocentric because it focuses on the mouse's painful change of
 > state. Rick Morneau clearly states that some verbs focuse on the state of
 > their subject and others more on the state of their object, but he doesn't
 > want to tag the two kinds of verb differently, so he found an easy solution:
 > (i) since "to eat" may be either transitive or intransitive and (ii) the
 > subject of the intransitive verb is tagged as a patient (iii), then the
 > subject of such verb should keep being tagged as a patient when it's
 > transitivized and (iv) the other patient of the verb (the mouse) is tagged
 > as a focus.
 > I find the solution pretty cool, but at the same time there's little chance
 > that a natlang uses the same trick.
 >


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.  Possibly you didn't intend it to be taken that
these were actual English forms, but just a closest equivalent so that
you could show the difference between endocentric and exocentric.  In
this case it's okay, if still confusing.  I can't se a good way of
focusing on the mouse in English without resorting to the passive.

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.  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.

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.  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.
!
![Incidentally, this distinction could also be handled by designating the
!above verb as simply A-s rather than AP-s.  However, I have chosen to
!keep the AP notation because of the inherent symmetry of the
!distinction, and because it emphasizes that the agent is causing itself
!to experience what is essentially an energetic "state".]

In my revision, an "AP-s" becomes simply "P-s", as nothing is being
stated to cause anything (explicitly).

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.

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.
You seem to be a deep thinker on such matters, although I often find
your posts difficult to understand.