Re: Triggeriness ...

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, but I chose to
believe it just got lost between the list being held and the flurry of other
posts about trigger systems.

So, is the system sketched below a trigger system, and if no, why not, and if
yes, why couldn't we then subclassify trigger languages as nominativesque,
ergativesque, and so on?

                                                              Andreas

Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:

> 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:
>
> Assume we want to translate the English sentences "I bathed _in the pool_"
> and "I killed a shark _in the pool_" into a trigger lang. According to my
> (apparently erroneous) understanding, these would become something like
>
> the_pool-TRIG bathed-LOC 1st.sg-S (i)
>
> and
>
> the_pool-TRIG killed-LOC 1st.sg-A a_shark-P (ii)
>
> 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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