Re: Active-Ergative langs (was Re: Ke'kh - degrees of volition)

daniel andreasson wrote:
>
> The Gray Wizard wrote:
>
> > Active languages, however, mark the arguments of a predicate
> > according to the semantic role (agent, patient, experiencer,
> > et. al.) they play and are thus context-sensitive.
>
> Hmm. Not very often I think. Rather the semantics of the verb.
> Hence that most active langs are head-marking.
I don't really understand why this should be a stringent reason for
head-marking rather than dependent-marking.  What's wrong with
dependent-marking active langs?  Did I do a big boffo in Nur-ellen?

Another question about active languages: How typical is it for active
langs
to bar inanimate nouns from filling the A slot?  In Nur-ellen, inanimate
nouns and pronouns have only the objective case, but no agentive case.
And I seem to have read that in Dakota, the agent must also be animate,
but I am not entirely sure.  And then there is this intriguing
hypothesis
about an earlier stage of PIE being active, which centers on the fact
that
neuter IE nominatives are morphologically identical with accusatives,
which
is explained by the lack of an agentive case (later to evolve into nom.)
in inanimate (later neuter) nouns in the active stage of PIE.
Do most active languages do this, or only a small subset?  And what are
they
called?  "Strict" active languages, perhaps?  My feeling about active
langs
is that inanimate A's are a no-go, because an inanimate item cannot
really
be an agent.  That's why inanimates in Nur-ellen have no agentives, and
not
because some linguist once said anything about it.

>       Though I think
> Marcus Smith could talk quite a bit about the semantics vs.
> the syntax. ;)
>
> And the actual meaning of using either Actor or Undergoer (or
> whatever you'd like to call the hyperroles) is often much more
> subtle and varying than simply vol vs. non-vol or control vs.
> non-control.
Yes, just about every single active language I have seen does it
differently,
it seems.  And are there active natlangs which grammaticalize more than
two
degrees of volition?

> > Is there an active analog to this kind of constraint?  Do any active
> > languages (nat- or con-) impose constraints on clause combination based
> > on relations of semantic roles?  Anyone!
>
> I wish there were! If anyone know of a natlang with active syntax,
> please speak up now! That would be absolute coolness!
>
> Kibrik (I sure talk a lot about him, don't I? :) writes about
> Yagua: "...there are some discourse-governed conditions for
> splitting the arguments of certain one-place verbs. If this
> can be shown to haev syntactic consequences, then Yagua would
> qualify as a syntactically active language." Anyone up for
> some field work? :)
>
> He also writes about syntactically active languages that "[t]he
> lack of a real example may be due to my scant knowledge of
> active languages, but it seems more plausible that their
> absence or rarity is not random. The active strategy implies
> two equally important hyperroles, A and U. This is incongruous
> with the idea of absolute saliency of one NP as a syntactic
> pivot." I think Kibrik - sadly - has a major point there.
And that's why so many Amerindian languages have switch reference,
in order to disambiguate the situation.  If I understood it correctly,
that is.

It is not entirely clear to me what a "syntactically active" language
would be.
However, I guess that it is one which behaves like a synt.acc. lang if
the
intransitive verb is active, but like a synt.erg. if it is not.  I.e.,
"The child threw the stone and sang" means "The child threw the stone,
and the child sang" while "The child threw the stone and fell" means
"The child threw the stone, and the stone fell".

I am actually pondering this for Nur-ellen, where these sentences would
be

I hin hedent i sarn ar linnent.

vs.

I hin hedent i sarn ar lantent.

> This shouldn't stop us all from creating syntactive conlangs,
> though. All the more reason to actually do it I say!
Yes!  It makes sense, and I think I'll fix this for Nur-ellen.
Perhaps I should add switch reference, but I think this would stretch
things
a bit in a language which is meant to be a member of a pre-IE family of
western Europe which is related to IE.  The better way, I think, is to
do as I have said above, and use subject/object pronouns (or repeat the
NP)
to mark situations where it goes the other way, as in

I hin hedent i sarn ar ja lantent.

"The child threw the stone and [the child] fell."

In this sentence, _ja_ is the 3rd person common gender animate object
pronoun,
which cannot refer to _sarn_ because _sarn_ is inanimate.

Jörg.