Re: Triggeriness ...

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Perhaps I should consider the sparsity of answers to the questions in the
> > below post as a sign that no-one feels like enlightening me,
>
> Now,now, no need to get snippy :-)))))))))))))
>
> but I chose to
> > believe it just got lost between the list being held and the flurry of
> other
> > posts about trigger systems.
>
> Bien sûr..............
My French isn't up to translating that, unfortunately.

> > So, is the system sketched below a trigger system, and if no, why not,
>
> <hopefully expert opinion>Yes, I think it is </hopefully expert opinion>
OK.

> >and if
> > yes, why couldn't we then subclassify trigger languages as nominativesque,
> > ergativesque, and so on?
> >
> Perhaps I'm being obtuse-- don't these two terms refer only to how a
> language handles A and P (or S and O)?
Well, and S - specifically which of them is identified with it. If there's
some bizarre language where all verbs are transitive, I can't see how you
could classify it as acc or erg.

> If you can trigger on ~focus
> ~subjectivize LOC et al. , where are you then? A LOC is neither an A nor a
> P.  And presumably in a trigger conlang, you could trigger on any role you
> wanted to (maybe within limits....)-- try GEN
>
> I stole John's mango
> John_TRIG stole-GEN mango-P I-A
> (it seems possible, but I've no idea how it could be equivalently translated
> into e.g. Engl., as we can paraphrase Pool-TRIG bathe-LOC I-A [pool swam-in
> [by] me] =~ a pool is where I swam (?)---maybe 'John is the person whose
> mango I stole'????)
"John's is the mango which I stole" is the best this xenophone can come up
with.

> In old TG, this would derive from 2 underlying S's, something like--:
> S[I - steal - mango+S'[mango belong John"]S']S --so it's unlikely that GEN
> is a valid role/valence of {steal}.
>
> For brevity, I'll snip your ex.sentences, but it seems to me you want to
> have special markings for S/A/P even when some other role is triggered.
> This might be necessary to avoid ambiguity (in the pool, of "shark" and "I",
> who killed whom?-- for clarity, actually you only need to mark one); but in
> many other cases e.g.[inanim.object] that would be unnecessary).  Still it
> could be done; there's nothing wrong with a little redundancy :-)
If I've not misunderstood completely, Tagalog has a "agent" marker which works
much like my "A" marker.

You and Javier have sort-of convinced me a trigger lang cannot be truly
nominative or accusative (by virtue of not having any true transitives), but
it still seems to me you should be able to classify it as "ergative-like"
or "accusative-like" (or "tripartite-like" or ...) based on how it treats non-
triggered NPs - it must be answerable if it would mark "I" in my first
sentence the same as either the "I" or the "shark" of my second.

(For the purposes of this discussion, I consider the lack of a marker, and a
specific syntactic spot, as examples of "marking".)

> > > Also, since this is apparently NOT how a trigger language works...,
>
> Well, it is, sort-of.........
>
> > >...what would one call a language that DOES work like this, and are there
> any?
>
> A trigger language with obligatory case marking?? I don't know of any, but
> maybe ANADEW.  (One could view Tag. ang, ng, sa etc. as case markers, but my
> feeling is more that they simply mark subsidiary (non-triggered
> ~non-focused) elements.
They certainly _look_ like case markers to me.

> And those depend on the underlying valency of the
> verb.  And some verbs are tricky-- we think of {swim} as mono-valent
> (requires only A, LOC is optional) but it can be sort-or bi-valent in
> "Ms.Ederle swam the English Channel" which can be passivized, but is "the
> Engl.Channel" a P or a LOC? (IMO the active version seems to have a deleted
> "across". )
> {love} OTOH seems to require only A and P, _can't_ have a LOC (?*I love her
> in the kitchen [but nowhere else???]), while {hit} requires A and P, and can
> have INST and LOC.
>
> Have you ever dipped into Filmore's "case grammar"-- ("The Case for Case" is
> often anthologized, may even be online.)  I found it a welcome alternative
> to Chomskyism, even though it never developed very far.
No. Believe it or not, but I'm not the sort of person who reads linguistic
literature on a regular basis. Might look for it some day, tho.

> Hope I have made some sense.............
This was easily the most helpful post as yet in this thread. Thanks.

                                                        Andreas

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