Re: Agents and patients (II)

Pablo Flores wrote:

>NPs in a sentence must follow this order; gaps are allowed, but
>you can't shift orders without shifting cases. This double shift
>also serves to mark topicality (still not sure about voice; I
>think there won't be any mark on verbs, since the following
>structure seems to suffice). Some examples:
>
>Active volitional agent uses case 1:
>
>    cat.1 mouse.2 kill
>    'cat kills mouse'
>
>In passive sentences, case 1 gets demoted to 4,
>which also brings the patient to the front (topical
>position):
>
>    mouse.2 cat.4 kill
>    *'from cat kill mouse'
>    'mouse is killed by cat'
>
>Non-volitional agents/experiencers use case 3,
>while their patients use case 4. The actual
>meaning of verbs using this construction may be
>different from the glosses.
>
>    cat.3 mouse.4 see
>    *'to cat see from mouse'
>    'cat sees mouse'
>
>In 'passive' sentences, there's a promotion of the syntactic
>object (no demotion of subject!): the patient becomes case 2,
>and topic:
>
>    mouse.2 cat.3 see
>    *'see mouse to cat'
>    'mouse is seen by cat'
>
>What does this look like? I personally think it's neat (the
>hierarchical order really helps!).
I like it!  Some questions:  (1) Is case 3 used only for 'canonically'
non-volitional agents, or for *all* non-volitional agents?  Can you
ever get case 2 and case 3 co-occurring?  In other words, if the
cat accidentally killed the mouse, which of the following would
you get?

        cat.1 mouse.2 kill
        mouse.2 cat.3 kill
        mouse.2 cat.4 kill
        cat.3 mouse.4 kill

(2) Is there a semantic difference between the following sentences,
other than which noun phrase is the topic?

        cat.3 mouse.4 see
        mouse.2 cat.3 see

A suggestion:  Use case 2 to denote objects which are somehow
'affected' by the action of the verb (i.e. true patients), and use
case 4 to denote objects which are not (completely) affected by
the action.  Under this scheme, "cat.3 mouse.4 see" means that
the mouse was unaffected by the fact that the cat saw it (and
may not even have been aware that the cat saw it); while
"mouse.2 cat.3 see" means that the mouse *was* affected by
being seen (as in a context where the mouse gets scared and
runs away as soon as the cat spots it).

(3) I assume that case 3 is used to express goals (motion
towards) while case 4 is used to express sources (motion
from).  But which case is used to express locations?
How are instruments handled in this system?

Matt.