Re: THEORY: Morphosyntactic Alignment (again?), and Milewski

On 5/16/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> On Mon, 15 May 2006 11:22:43 -0400, Jim Henry
> ><jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
<snip much goodness>

> The four of "my" types that _couldn't_ be covered by any of Milewski's six
> types, look to be (er.xi), (er.xii), (er.xiii), and (er.xiv).
>
> I would, therefore, be very interested in any natlang which attests to one
> of them.
I suspect the reason they don't fit any of Milewski's
types is that he is by default assigning the unmarked
one of genitive or construct to the least-marked of
the theta role cases - nominative or ergative.
In my analysis (such as it is) I would not assign
the unmarked one to any particular case, and thus
I would collapse some your types together: e.g.,
your v and ix I would both describe as:

A=S (nominative), O (accusative), G (genitive), C is unmarked

and similarly with the others that have a distinct G
but conflate C with A or O, and those that have
distinct C but conflate G with A or O.

Of course this analysis wouldn't work for a language
that really has a construct state identical to a
particular oblique case and also has a distinct genitive,
or vice versa; but if there are any such natlangs
I don't know about them.  As far as I know
the construct state as such is attested only in
the Semitic language family (see below), and there
construct state is orthogonal to case.

> ObConLang:  I would also be interested in any conlang which attests to one
> of them.

> >>2) ObConLang: How do your conlangs fit into this
> >>typology?
>
> [JH]
> >My gjâ-zym-byn is fluid-S active, with a variety of
> >genitive postpositions for specific relationships
> >(possession, ownership, entity-attribute, part-whole,
> >authorship, kinship...), and no construct state.
> >As a fluid-S language I don't think it fits into >Milewski's typology at
> all.
..........
> >There are at least three postpositions that can
> >mark the subject of a sentence
>
> [er]
> _That_ is _very_ _interesting_!
>
> [JH]
> >(depending on animacy and volitionality)
> >and at least six that can mark the object of a
> >transitive verb,
>
> [er]
> That is interesting.
>
> [JH]
> >plus several others that can mark the predicate of a
> >subject noun when there is no verb.
>
> [er]
> That sounds like the kind of phenomenon Milewski would have talked about;
> unfortunately I can't figure out what he would have said about it.
>
> At any rate, it's both interesting in its own right, and right on-topic for
> this post.
See
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/grammar.htm#section5

for details.  Feel free to inquire onlist or offlist
if any part of it isn't clear.


> [JH]
> >One of my oldest conlangs, Pliv-Rektek, had both a
> >genitive case and what I then called a
> >contra-genitive, not having heard of the
> >term "construct state".
>
> [er]
> Is "construct state" a "case", as it seems at the moment?  Or is it
> like "definite" and "indefinite", whatever they are?
I treated the contra-genitive like a case in Pliv-Rektek,
but according to this Wikipedia article,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_constructus

the construct state in Arabic and Hebrew is a
kind of definiteness marking, not a case.
I don't know if there is anything similar in other
natlangs outside the Semitic family.  The
Wikipedia article mentions a "parallel" case
in Irish which on close examination is not
parallel at all.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry