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Re: THEORY: Case mismatches (was: Re: Viko Notes)

From:Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Date:Thursday, June 27, 2002, 22:38
On Wed, 26 Jun 2002, John Cowan wrote:

> Marcus Smith scripsit: > > > This topic was part of my MA thesis, so I have lots more I could say about > > this. > > Cough up already, then!
My thesis is broadly concerned with instances of 'unbalanced coordination', 'partial agreement' in particular. By 'unbalanced coordination', I mean contexts where [X & Y] is grammatical, but [Y & X] is not. The example I start off with is in Pima: Napt aapi c heg Eric hen~-ees heg hen~-kalit tako. Q-2sg-pf you and DET Eric me-steal DET my-car yesterday `Did you and Eric steal my car (from me) yesterday?' but just by swapping the order of the two subject conjuncts, you get an ungrammatical sentence. *Napt heg Eric c aapi hen~-ees heg hen~-kalit tako. The reason it is ungrammatical, is because the initial auxiliary must be inflected to agree with the first conjunct of the subject. That condition is satisfied in the first example, but violated in the second. The case facts that started this thread are another type of unbalanced coordination, because the case of the conjuncts depends on the ordering of conjuncts (among other things). "him and I" is good, but "I and him" is bad. There seem to be two broad patterns to the ordering you find across languages. In some languages, the "deviant" conjunct (the one that does not participate in triggering agreement or gets the incorrect case) is typically ordered with respect to the conjunction in the same way as the object to the verb. That is, in OV languages, the conjunct immediately before "and" is deviant, but in VO languages, it the conjunct immediately after "and" that is deviant. This pattern was first noticed (to my knowledge) in a 1993 dissertation from Oslo by Johannessen. Corbett, in his work on gender and number, notes that agreement with the closest conjunct is very common. So unlike the previous pattern, the "well-behaved" conjunct is the one that is closest to what it is interacting with. That is, if the verb (adjective, etc) agrees with just one conjunct, then it agrees with the closest; if only one conjunct has the proper case, it is the one closest to the case assigner. Some languages follow the Johannessen pattern (like Norwegian), but others follow the Corbett pattern (like English, probably). But in most languages, you can't tell which pattern is being followed. If you look back up at the Pima example, the conjunct triggering agreement is the closest (as Corbett predicts), but the deviant conjunct is where I would expect it to be in Johannessen's analysis. The way to distinguish the two patterns for Pima, then, is to change the word order, which is normally perfectly legitimate: it is a "non-configurational" language. The surprising result is that it is not possible to have partial agreement and a subject initial sentence. If both the Corbett and Johannessen pattern's are not obeyed, the entire sentence is ungrammatical. Other languages that appear to pattern like Pima are Arabic and German. I'll spare you guys the theoretical explanation I give. It's couched in (a modified version of) the Minimalist Program, mainly for political reasons. (66.6% of my committe are rabid minimalists.) My analysis is closer to Categorial Grammar, though. (MP, CG, what's the difference these days? The older Chomsky gets, the more his stuff looks like CG and TAG.) And obviously I've glossed over tons of details: there are animacy heirarchy effects (which I don't really discuss, just note), different semantic interpretations, and all kinds of other nutty confounding factors. This gives the basic ideas, though. Marcus

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And Rosta <a-rosta@...>[CONLANG] Case mismatches (was: Re: Viko Notes)