Re: Agents and patients
| From: | Jim Grossmann <steven@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, March 15, 2000, 6:30 |
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>I'm developing a new language for an RPG setting
>(Wamen and G'amah were for this one too). I thought
>of having agent/patient, with a twist regarding
>perception and non-volitional verbs.
>The usual pattern is subject-AGT, object-PAT; but
>for these verbs one might have subject-PAT, object-ABL
>(ablative):
> 3p.PAT house.ABL see
> 'They see a house.' (*'To them from a house is seen.'?)
Do you mark the difference between 3p singular and 3p plural? If so, you
might want to specify "3p.pl." for "they." If not, sorry if I was too
picky.
About your terminology: You may want to separate syntactic from semantic
terms a little more: you do this with subject & object (syntactic) vs.
agent & patient (semantic), but you don't do this with "ablative" and
"dative." You might want to reserve these terms for syntactic description,
and tell us what concepts they correspond to (source, goal, beneficiary).
Do "ablative" and "dative" have special applications in case grammar that I
don't know about?
Elsewhere I have seen the subjects of verbs of perception being said to
stand, not for agents, but for experiencers. I have not seen the causes of
the experiences that the experiencers have referred to as "stimuli," but I
wonder why not.
So for your sentence, I would put ...
3p.pl.dative house.ablative see
experiencer stimulus type of experience
'To them from house see.'
"They see the house."
>What I'm not sure about here is what to do with the
>verb -- agreement would be marked in this language, but
>I'm not sure with which part of the sentence
My temptation would be to mark the verb for agreement with whatever case and
number the subject happened to have, but that's just me.
>Passive
>voice is also a concern here; I may leave the verb as it
>is, and change the cases again to focus on the house:
> house.ABL 3p.DAT see.(PASSIVE?)
> 'A house is seen by them.'
house.ablative 3p.pl.dative see
stimulus experiencer type of experience
'From house to them see.'
Contrast this with "To them from house see."
With this particular kind of verb, given that the arguments have distinct
cases, a passive doesn't seem necessary. The cases let you change the
order of the nouns without losing sight of who's doing the seeing and what
is being seen. And verb agreement would let you identify the subject in
either case without the need for a distinct passive morpheme.
That doesn't mean that you can't have a passive anyway. AFAIK, there are
natlangs with truck loads of cases that also have passive voice. My
temptation would be to convey the passive by changing the position of the
verb, but there would be absolutely no shame in using a passive morpheme.
On the other hand, if nouns that stand for experiencers have a different
case than nouns that stand for agents, would the former be subject to the
same transformations as the latter? You may want to restrict the use of
passive voice to clauses whose verbs stand for honest-to-god actions and
whose arguments include honest-to-god agents and patients.
>I only have AGT, PAT, ABL and DAT, and I'm somehow seeing
>a hierarchy -- in that order. Does this make sense? Any
>problems with this mad scheme? (As for ambiguity: I can
>live with it, plus I have adpositions to enhance the broad
>meaning of the cases, if needed.) Help of any kind would
>be appreciated.
I don't see a hierarchy here; what I've seen so far doesn't remind me of
the hierarchy of agency used to account for the splits in split ergative
languages.
However, I don't think your scheme is mad. You are right about case
ambiguity: it's nothing that a few adpositions can't solve.
I'm looking forward to more posts, particularly about how you intend to
handle existential and copular verbs.
Jim
P.S. Don't forget reciprocals and reflexives.