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Re: "He opened the door and he (same referent) left the room"

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Sunday, June 27, 2004, 15:02
En réponse à Trebor Jung :


>How do natlangs handle sentences like in the subject?
Many people have given plenty of answers to that already, so I just want to add a little bit here. As some have said, many langs simply omit the second subject, like in English. However, even then, interesting things can happen, because you have to take into account the syntactic orientation of the language. Indeed, just as a language can be grammatically accusative or ergative (and all the other possibilities around them, but let's for now concentrate only on those two), i.e. in the way it handles the relationship between the grammatical slots available for the main actants and the corresponding semantic roles, a language can be syntactically accusative or ergative, in the way referents are considered when something is underspecified. Basically, in a syntactically accusative language, the sentence: "he opened the door and left the room" would mean unambiguously: "he opened the door and he (same referent) left the room". However, in a syntactically ergative language, the same sentence could only mean "he opened the door and the door left the room" (the unspecified subject of an intransitive verb always refers back to the *object* of the previous transitive verb. In other words, absolutives keep refering to each other). The interesting thing is that grammatical and syntactical orientation needn't match. For instance, Basque is grammatically as ergative as one can imagine. However, syntactically it's strongly accusative (so that the sentence "he opened the door and left the room" means exactly the same thing in English and in Basque, despite the fact that English is grammatically accusative and Basque grammatically ergative). Now add to that all the possibilities between full accusativity and full ergativity (Split-S, Fluid-S, Active, or some different things like trigger systems) and think that you can have each of those, relatively independently (I said "relatively" because there seem to be limitations. I for instance know no grammatically accusative yet syntactically ergative language) on both the grammatical and the syntactical dimension, and you can already have quite a few exotic things going on ;)) . Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
william drewery <will65610@...>