Re: Triggeriness ...

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> If there's
> some bizarre language where all verbs are transitive, I can't see how you
> could classify it as acc or erg.
What a fascinating idea.  Completely counter-Real- World-as-We-Know-It.  How
would it express such concepts as:
--He died. (?[unknown S] killed him)
--That glass is broken. (?[unknown S] broke it)
--I'm cold. (?cold [affects] me)
--The soup is cold. (???)
Seems to me you'd have very frequent [unknown subject].......:-)
Would it class "be" and "become" as transitive? After all, they do take
"objects" (and lots of Americans don't see any difference between "I saw a
doctor" and "I became a doctor"  :-(((  )

Have you tried to devise such a language?

ObConlang!! Old Kash could treat 'go' and 'come' sort-of transitively, at
least by putting the destination in the accusative case

> > 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.
>
You really should. Fillmore (correct spelling); it's quite interesting and
he writes clearly, unlike Chomsky and crew, at least IIRC..... And in talks,
sometimes his example sentences could bring down the house-- e.g "I'm sorry
I broke your wolf" and "I'm sorry I broke your handkerchief". (Well, in
context they were funny.......)  If by chance it's not on line, or in a
library, I could send you a xerox of it (though it's longish, 88 pages,
maybe 44 legal-size xerox pages)

You can find it in: Emmon Bach & Robert Harms, eds.,
"Universals in Linguistic Theory", New York, Holt 1968
(Also contains important papers by McCawley and Kiparsky)

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