Re: Help in Determining Asha'ille Typology

----- Original Message -----
From: "JS Bangs" <jaspax@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2003 1:37 AM
Subject: Re: Help in Determining Asha'ille Typology


> Andreas Johansson sikyal:
>
> > Quoting JS Bangs <jaspax@...>:
> >
> > > These are the wrong kind of examples to use for deciding whether a
> > > language is accusative, ergative, or active. These terms have to do
with
> > > the marking of arguments to a verb and transitivity, so we'd need to
see
> > > some examples of that. Can you post translations of these three
sentences:
> > >
> > > 1) I eat food.
> > > 2) I run.
> > > 3) I fall.
> > >
> > > In most general terms:
> > >
> > > An accusative language is one in which "I" in all three sentences is
> > > marked the same (nominative), while "food" is marked differently
> > > (accusative).
> > >
> > > An ergative language is one in which "food" from (1) and "I" from (2)
and
> > > (3) are marked the same (absolutive), while "I" from (1) is marked
> > > differently (ergative).
> > >
> > > An active language is one in which "I" from (1) and (2) is marked the
same
> > > (agentive), while "food" and "I" from (3) are marked the same
> > > (patientive). This is subject to a lot of language-specific variation,
> > > though, so beware.
> >
> > What would we call a language that marks "I" from (1) the same as "I" in
(3),
> > and "I" in (2) the same as "food" in (1)? Beyond weird, that is.
>
> Maggel? I doubt that such a situation is common enough to have its own
> name.
>
> I put a little more thought into this today, and realized that you could
> deductively arrive at the conclusion that there are three broad types of
> languages, categorized by how agency and transitivity interact in the
> syntax.
>
> The four roles I indicated above are equivalent to the four quadrants in
> the following diagram. The top row represents the agency of the argument,
> and the side row represents the transitivity of the verb:
>
>        +agt    -agt
>
> +trans  (1)    (2)
> -trans  (3)    (4)
>
>
> If we allow only two morphosyntactic categories in which to divide these,
> what are the possibilities? If we allow anything, there are eight ways to
> group them. However, (1) and (2) are the only two quadrants that can
> co-occur in the same utterance, so we will probably want these to be
> separate for intelligibility. That brings the possibilities down to four.
>
> (Of course, there is at least one counterexample to this, the "monster
> raving loony language" in Iran. But it proves the rule: there's only *one*
> counterexample.)
>
> The four remaining possible groupings are these:
>
> A: 1,  B: 2,3,4 = ergative
> (A is ergative, B is absolutive)
>
> A: 1,3,4, B: 2 = accusative
> (A is nominative, B is accusative)
>
> A: 1,3, B: 2,4 = active
> (A is agentive, B is patientive)
>
> A: 1,4, B: 2,3 = ????
>
> This last one is what Andreas talked about. However, we should notice that
> this groups the points that have nothing in common together, which is
> completely counter-intuitive and unlikely. Andreas' Law of Freaks demands
> that some language does it, but I don't know what it is.

Having just argued against Andreas' side, I would also like to argue for
it -

Imagine a language, Case 1 is marked by -s, Case 2 by -n, Case 3 by -m and
Case 4 by -z.  Now imagine, due to phonological changes, -z and -s merge
into -z, and -m and -n merge into -n. Lets call 1 and 4, A, 2 and 3, B.

'I' is ka, 'food' is 'mu', fall is 'tu', run is 'ki', and eat is 'zu'


The old version comes first, then the new one

kas mun zu
I.1 food.3 eat

kaz mun zu
I.A food.B eat

kam ki
I.2 run

kan ki
I.B run

kaz tu
I.4 fall

kaz tu
I.A fall

This means that the two opposite cases merge, but they would not be re-split
through another process, as would happen if, say, cases 1 and 2 merged,
because the two different meanings occur only in very different contexts.

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