Re: Triggeriness ...

Date:    Sat, 13 Dec 2003 15:38:22 -0500
From:    Javier BF <uaxuctum@...>
Subject: Re: Triggeriness ...

> > > Then, Tagalog is not an accusative nor and ergative language,
> > > because it has only one core case (the 'subject' or 'trigger' or
> > > however you like to name it) and this case has none of the roles
> > > assigned to it by default, being its semantics entirely determined
> > > by and dependent on verbal voice.
> >
> > I'm uncertain as to your use of "core" here - what do you interpret
> > _ng_ marked NPs as, if they aren't core arguments?
>
> Core arguments are those that are required for the
> sentence to be complete and grammatical, and the
> number of core arguments taken by a verb is known
> as its "valency". They don't need to be expressed
> as phrases, they can be expressed as verbal
> inflections. But it must be noted that sometimes,
> depending on the verb, this may require arguments
> that aren't usually treated as core in the language.
> E.g. in "She planted the garden with roses", "with
> roses" is here a core argument (* "She planted the
> garden" - see note below), but "with ..." arguments
> aren't usually core in English. The general core
> arguments in English are the subject (which is
> required by all verbs) and the primary and
> secondary objects (required by the transitive
> and ditransitive verbs).
Mostly correct, although I believe most scholars who work on
grammatical relations (Dixon or Van Valin, to cite just two)
do not consider secondary objects to be "core" grammatical roles.
For Dixon, only the "A" and "P" roles are treated as such.

(Also, surely you mean the "notional subject" as opposed
to just "subject" since the formal subject of syntactically
ergative languages is a relation between S and P roles, and
is not the same as accusative languages' "subjects".)

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