Re: THEORY: Alignment of ditransitive with monotransitive case roles.

On Wednesday 18 May 2005 01:25 CEST, Tom Chappell wrote:

 > Thanks to anyone who answers.
 > I sort of expect some of the answers to be "Definitively,
 > no one knows yet."

This answer is not very helpful I guess. For what it's
worth ... hey, I'm proud to maybe have understood something
that first looked puzzling to me as an linguistically
untrained (read: not so savvy) person.

If I understood you right, English, just like French and my
own conlang Ayeri are Accusative Secondary. I noticed,
though, that German is the 'oddball' here and is Accusative
Indirect. Yes, we've got Dative Movement, though of course
the obligatory "to R" ("an R") is not wrong, but just not
preferred. R *must* be in dative case, while D=S=A and T=P:

   Jemand gibt jemandem etwas
    Nom          Dat     Acc
    S=A    V     R=R     T=P

And yes, your thoughts are interesting, though I only
understood it with some scribblings of how Accusative and
how Ergative langs group cases and how they do the
described things (3->2-transtive, antipassivisation).

Furthermore, in German, in some monotransitive sentences,
the DO must usually take accusative but others need to be
in dative case: Experiencers are usually in dative (only
experiencers in intransitive sentences?!) and some
prepositions trigger dative as well, others trigger
accusative case.

Carsten

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