Re: Topic and non-topic pronouns
| From: | Tim Smith <timsmith@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 28, 1999, 22:00 |
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At 03:19 PM 3/27/99 PST, Danny Wier wrote:
>khaT@v@ Tim Smith:
>
>>Does anybody know of any natlangs that use different third-person
>pronouns
>>(and/or different pronominal agreement markers on verbs) to represent
>topics
>>and non-topics?
>
>Hmmm... all I can think of is Cree (I had the example in a book but I
>don't have the book with me), but that's prolly just the
>proximate/obviate dichotomy you mention below (since Cree is Algonquian,
>I think)...
See below.
>[snip]
>I'm planning to do the same thing in Tech, that is, have a four-slot (or
>more!) verb structure where the fully developed stem can bear prefixes
>(which indicate mood and other things), a first suffix for subject
>number, person, and gender (yes, gender) in various tenses and voices,
>and a final suffix which indicates the person (and possibly number and
>gender as well) of the direct object and/or indirect object. So I'll
>have a pretty complex verb conjugation schema. An infix that falls
>somewhere in the final suffix would indicate whether or not the object
>is "near" or "far"; either I'll use -k- (lenited to -x-) to mark
>distance from the speaker and addressee, or a vowel shift.
That sounds sort of like some of the polysynthetic Native American
languages, like the Iroquoian family.
>Also, I plan
>on doing things such as conjugation of prepositions and genitive nouns,
>where I'll also mark which person, number, gender, and topic/focus
>status the antecedent represents.
My idea also includes conjugated prepositions. And I was also thinking of
having the possessed NP in a genitive construction agree in person and
number with the possessor, probably using the same person/number suffixes as
prepositions.
Or maybe, instead of prepositions, using serial verbs with switch-reference
marking, so that, for instance, a sentence that would be translated into
idiomatic English as "the man walked into the house" would have a literal
meaning something like "the man walked and entered the house" or "the man
entered the house walking":
man 3sT-Past-walk SimSS-3sN-go:into house
[Abbreviations: 3sT = third person singular topic
3sN = third person singular non-topic
SimSS = simultaneous, same subject
(The switch-reference prefix replaces both the subject agreement and tense
prefixes.)]
>[snip]
>Well I don't know what a direct/inverse system is, could you elaborate?
>Also, I've heard of the proximate/obviative distinction referred to in
>less formal terms as a third and a "fourth" person...
Here's a quote from something I posted back in January:
For those of you who may be wondering what proximate/obviative and
direct/inverse marking are, the basic idea is that there's a hierarchy of NP
types, with (in the Algonquian languages) 2nd person at the top, then 1st
person, then 3rd person at the bottom. (In some other language families
that use this kind of system, 1st person is above 2nd person, but they're
both always higher than 3rd person.) If there's more than one 3rd-person
argument in a clause, one of them is proximate (roughly, the one that's most
topical) and the others are obviative, with proximate being higher in the
hierarchy. (In the Algonquian family, this distinction is explicitly marked
in the noun morphology; in some others it's determined by word order and/or
context.) A transitive verb is morphologically marked as either direct or
inverse. If it's direct, of the two core arguments, the one higher on the
hierarchy is interpreted as the subject or agent, and the lower one as the
object or patient; if it's inverse, it's the other way around. There's
somebody on this list (I think Laurie Gerholz) who could tell you more about
how this works in the Algonquian family; there's also at least one other
conlang, Dirk Elzinga's Tepa, that uses this kind of system.
>[snip]
>
>Hey, somebody here knows a lot about Tagalog and the Philippine
>languages of the Austronesian family, and it uses some sort of trigger
>system to mark topic and other entities in a clause; I'm just not the
>expert to really get into how it works.
You're probably thinking of Kristian Jensen. His posts on trigger systems
in Tagalog and other languages of the Philippines, and in his conlang,
Boreanesian, have been very interesting and informative. I'm also
interested in such systems; I've been working off and on (mostly off, I'm
afraid) for some time on an SOV trigger language called Hwendaaru.
Basically, in this kind of system (which in the "real world" exists only in
a subset of the Austronesian languages), there's one NP in every clause (the
"trigger", which is sort of a subject but not exactly) whose case role is
indicated by some kind of affix on the verb, rather than by word order, case
marking, adpositions, or whatever.
Also, Matt Pearson has posted a lot about Malagasy, which also has a trigger
system, though rather different from those of the Filipino languages.
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net
Get your facts first and then you can distort them as you please.
- Mark Twain