Re: ciantwo class system, verbs, & semantic roles

Ed Heil wrote:


> Nouns in the sentence are assigned to the role heirarchy according to
> the following plan:
>
> 1. For nouns of equal animacy, the first one is assigned to the
> higher role in the role heirarchy.
>
> e.g. "Bob Dave see" translates as "Bob sees Dave."
>
> 2. For nouns of different animacy, the higher-animacy one is assigned
> the higher place in the role heirarchy.
>
> e.g. "Man dog see" = "Dog man see" -- both translate as "The man sees
> the dog."
This is close to the way of Chleweyish... but in Chleweyish there are not
such cases as more or less animated.

Actually in Chleweyish a "Bob Dave see" is completely ambiguous: Bob sees
Dave, or Dave sees Bob, or Bob and Dave see eachother or Bob and Dave (can)
see.  "Man dog see" represents the same problem which doesn't exists in "man
pencil see" or "pencil man see"... unless this is some kind of smart pencil
with a camera (or an animated pencil in a cartoon)... some ways for "The
pencil sees the man" would be
   pencil see who? man
or
   man what-happen? pencil see

[..]
> 3b. If a clitic pronoun is attached to the verb, it is promoted to
> the highest semantically possible argument role.
>
> Thus, "man dog ANIMAL.see" means "the dog sees the man."
>
> 3c.  The flip side of 3b: if a clitic pronoun is attached to the
> verb, it is *demoted* to the lowest semantically possible argument
> role.  This seems good to me in general because "low-level" semantic
> roles tend to be patients, and I tend to see patients as more closely
> tied to the verb than agents.  (direct objects being part of a VP and
> all that jazz.)
>
> Thus, "man dog HUMAN.see" means "the dog sees the man."
>
> But what if you only want to move something one level up or down in
> the heirarchy?  For example, "the father offers the dog a master" with
> a verb for "offering someone something" with the roles OFFERER >
> RECIPIENT > THING-OFFERED.
>
> That would work with 3c but not 3b:
>
> Father master dog HUMAN.offer
>
> No, wait, which human gets demoted?  Probably the logical rule would
> be that the last one in line gets demoted.  Oh, wait: the HUMAN clitic
> has an obviative form, so you could just use that.  Still, it seems as
> if this kind of problem could crop up.
>
> 3c. Another possibility would be a verb affix which basically means,
> "ignore animacy heirarchy for the purpose of verb assignment and go
> with strict word order instead."  But this seems, I don't know, kind
> of artificial and extreme to me.
>
> Any comments or ideas?
Well, for Cheweyish the way would be making two phrases:
  master there1 dog have1 why? father give
where there1 is an assigned pronoun and have1 is an inflected have refering
to what was placed in there1.  But there are some non-inflected ways also:
  master what-happen? dog have why? father give
  dog have what? master why? father give

(actually there are some rules that would help unambiguish phrases like "dog
father master give" or "father master dog give" etc. but they are not
completely documented and are based on both word order and semantic
cathegory so it is better to play safe with the longer phrases with the
interrogative conectors)

For your case, I guess that making all those question words into case
marking clitics would be an alternative.