Re: Triggeriness ...

Incidentally (and achtung, Carsten Becker)-- see my post with Tsou exs. at
msg. #78539 of 13 Jan 03 in the listserv archive.

Andreas Johansson wrote:


> This discussion of trigger languages is making me confused - I thought I
had a
> decent idea what they were about, but apparently not. Anyway, it seems to
me
> whether a language use a trigger system or not should be orthogonal to
whether
> it's accusative, ergative, active, clairvoyant, MRL or tripartite, so
please
> shoot the following down:
Nothing to shoot down, as far as I can see...Such a system is sui generis
IMO-- the point being that you can focus (in my understanding, make a
subject of) any of the various possible arguments of a verb.  In Tagalog,
that means 1. Agent/actor (~"active voice") 2. patient (~"passive voice") 3.
instrument 4. location.  In related languages there may be additional
possibilities, like Time and Benefactive (though I see that Tsou conflates
Inst and Ben.). And some verbs (experientials?) might not be able to focus
on all possibilites-- just a guess.
>
> Assume we want to translate the English sentences "I bathed _in the pool_"
given two arguments, there would be two possiblities.

> and "I killed a shark _in the pool_"
three possiblities here.

 According to my
> (apparently erroneous) understanding, these would become something like
>
> the_pool-TRIG bathed-LOC 1st.sg-S (i)
this look like locative focus (sort of lit. "the pool was- bathed-in by me"
= proper Engl. "the pool is where I bathed)--  IIRC, lst sg. would carry the
"oblique" marker in Tag., it definitely wouldn't be marked as "Subject"
since "pool" is the grammatical "subject".  I think.........

you could have (i.a) I-TRIG bathed-ACT pool-OBL
(where OBL might possibly could be a locative prep., I'm not sure) That
translates : I bathed in the pool
>
> and
>
> the_pool-TRIG killed-LOC 1st.sg-A a_shark-P (ii)
again, 3 possibilities

I'll ask a Tag. native speaker (and linguist) friend about these. As well as
Carsten's example sentences.  I also have a paper of hers, and I'll see what
I can dig out of it.  I'm curious too, and regret I never studied Tag. or
Bisayan. They are clearly much more complicated than any Indonesian language
of my experience.

The following I''m simply not sure about.........
>
> and therefore it would a perfectly well-defined question which, if any, of
the
> markers S, A and P are identified. Say that the markings S and A are the
same,
> and we'd have a nominative trigger language; say A and P are the same, and
> we'd have a MRL trigger language; and so on.
>
> It would still apply if we retopicalize:
>
> 1st.sg-TRIG bathed-S' the_pool-LOC' (iii)
>
> 1st.sg-TRIG killed-A' the_pool-LOC' a_shark-P (iv)
>
> a_shark-TRIG killed-P' the_pool-LOC' 1st.sg-S (v)
>
> since we simply ask which, if any, of S', A' and P' are identified.
>
> Also, since this is apparently NOT how a trigger language works, what
would
> one call a language that DOES work like this, and are there any?

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