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

-----Original Message-----
From: H. S. Teoh [mailto:hsteoh@quickfur.yi.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2000 4:13 PM
To: The Gray Wizard
Subject: Re: Active-Ergative langs (was Re: Ke'kh - degrees of volition)


On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 02:18:02PM -0400, The Gray Wizard wrote:
[snip]
> Syntactically accusative:
>
> John kissed Mary and left. (John kissed Mary and he left.)
> John[A] kissed Mary[P] and (he[S]) left.
[snip]
> Syntactically ergative:
>
> John kissed Mary and left. (John kissed Mary and she left)
> John[A] kissed Mary[P] and (she[S]) left.
[snip]
> John kissed-antip Mary and left (John kissed Mary and he left)
> John[S] kissed-antip Mary[Obl] and (he[S]) left.
[snip]

This is very interesting! My conlang has a system of sentence adjoinment
that handles these constructs in a different way: two sentences can be
adjoined through a "linking word" -- usually a noun -- which is marked for
*two* syntactic functions (noun cases), one for the first sentence, one
for the second. (For examples, see my other post on "Look and thou shalt
see".)

The interesting thing about this is that in your first example sentence:
        John kissed Mary and (he) left.
my conlang would use "John" as the linking word, and would structure the
sentence this way:
        Mary(rcp) kiss(verb) <aux-cvy>John(org) left(verb)
The auxilliary inflection <aux-cvy> marks the function of "John" in the
*subsequent* sentence (John left); the normal inflection marks the
function of "John" in the first sentence (John kissed Mary).

For your second sentence:
        John kissed Mary and (she) left.
my conlang would use "Mary" as the linking word. Here, the sentence would
be structured thus:
        John(org) kiss(verb) <aux-cvy>Mary(rcp) left(verb)
Here, the <aux-cvy> on the noun "Mary" marks its function on the second
sentence "she left", while the normal case marking (rcp) marks "Mary" as
the recipient of the verb (kiss) in the first sentence.

Furthermore, my conlang can do this with *every* noun case -- so you can
use instrumental or locative nouns as "linking nouns" as well. So in
effect, you can construct sentences like:
1)      He went to the countryside by the horse and (the horse) stopped at
        the well.
2)      He went to the countryside by the horse and (he) stopped at the
        well.

As to whether my conlang is ergative or active or something else, I really
don't know, because it doesn't analyse sentences as subject-predicate,
but it uses an event(verb)-centric model. It's too long to attach to this
current post, but if anyone's interested, I'll post it separately.


T