Re: THEORY: transitivity

Sally wrote:

> Ah, this is Daniel Andreasson!  Okay, I'm coming back to this post,
> having butted into Nik Taylor's reply to you.
Sorry about the name confusion. I had to reinstall Outlook Express and=20
somehow the server name replaced my real name, Daniel.

Anyway.

> > (And possibly also distinguish between verbs that
> > don't have an agent, eg. "I sleep" and verbs that do.)
>=20
> Do you mean, by your last statement, to distinguish between verbs
> that don't have a volitional subject ("I sleep"--involuntarily) and
> verbs that do ("I kick back vigorously--quite voluntarily")?  Because
> I do just this in Teonaht, and I call them Agents and Experiencers.
> Both of these categories can take transitive or intransitive verbs.
Yes! That's exactly what I mean. See also my explanation in reply=20
to Nik's post.

> > 0. (It) rains   [no S or O]
> > 1. I sleep    [only S]
> > 2. I eat (food)    [S and O]
> > 3. I give (it to you)    [1 S and 2 Os]
> >
> > The question is if transitive verbs should be conjugated
> > as intransitive if they don't have an object.
>=20
> This has always been a question of mine.  But my language is much more
> interested in whether one does something by choice or involuntarily.
> So "I eat" is more likely to be categorized as agentive rather than
> intransitive.
I was thinking of making both distinctions at once.

> > Has any of you done this in your langs, or do you know
> > what the standard is in natlangs?
>=20
> This is a good question, Daniel, and I don't know how to answer it.
> I guess it depends on how much importance you place on transitivity.
> Ergative/absolutive languages do; nominative/accusative languages
> don't, and tend to make no distinctions in form for "eat," whether
> it be transitive or intransitive.
Yeah, I know. That's why I thought I could do that in an accusative
lang. But I've never had a try at an ergative lang, and this might be
a good start. And I guess it would be easier to figure out the way
to go about this if I made it ergative. Perhaps I could mix both
systems, like Samoan. That'd be something!

> In Teonaht, however, you would
> say  "ry oua" if you are listening volitionally to a concert, but
> "ry ouan" if you are hearing an annoying noise and are pissed off
> about it.
That's a pretty cool distinction, isn't it? And a good job of just the
suffix -n, too. Now I'm sure. I'm definitely gonna have this feature
in my lang.

> A good question to ask yourself is whether "eat" always implies an
> object, regardless of whether you state it or not.  Given that you
> can't be eating without something to eat, then I'd say don't make
> the distinction.
>=20
> 1.  Mother's cooking.
> 2.  Mother's cooking dinner.
> 3.  Mother's cooking  (she's in a pot stewing, or she's mad as hell)
>=20
> If "cook" doesn't have this third possibility in your language, which
> is kind of a middle voice, then I'd say make the two constructions
> transitive.  It's really interesting.
Hmm... I haven't thought of that. Because I really should. That seems
to be an important issue here. Thanks for mentioning this.

> > A second thought:
> >
> > Perhaps this is just some kind of object agreement on
> > the verb:
> > "-y" =3D hey, there are no objects!
> > "-e" =3D listen up, there's an object as well.
> > "-u" =3D look out, two objects coming your way!
> > "-i" =3D what? Not even a subject?
> >
> > Then I might expand this into:
> > "-er" =3D there's an object and it's 1p. (I.e. probably me)
> > "-et" =3D one object and it's 2p.
> > "-ek" =3D one object, 3p.
> > etc.
> > =3D> Na mrinek nando.
> > 1p.sg. eat.1obj.3p food.
> >
> > This might be really fun!
> >
> > Do you have any comments?
>=20
> I think these sound good.  Of course, the presence of the object
> will make the sentence clear, so you might ask yourself if in
> the logic of language development these distinctions are necessary,
> but we have so much redundancy already in languages I don't think
> this should be an issue.
:)=20
Isn't redundancy great? You can pretty much get away with anything
in conlanging, just by mentioning the word redundancy!
If I make it ergative, I'd rather make the verb agree with the subject
as well.

Thanks for all the great suggestions,

Daniel Andreasson