Re: Some or any

> On Sun, 26 May 2002 01:11:14 -0400 Muke Tever
>
> <alrivera@...> writes:
> > You're not supposed to trust X-English English-X dictionaries on
> > stuff like
> > this, but I have {quelque chose} for French, {chto-to} and
> > {chto-nibud'} for Russian, and {io} for Esperanto.
> >
There is a book, written back in 1887, published in pb in 2000 by
Oxford. The title is Indefinite Pronouns, the author is Martin
Haspelmath. In the first couple of chapters he tries to define an
indefinite pronoun, and ends up saying that this work will really
only be about series of indefinite pronouns, like the SOME, ANY, and
NO series in English. They apparently have nine functions:

1) specific, known to speaker
Somebody called while you were away: guess who!

2) specific, unknown to the speaker
I heaard something, but I couldn't tell what it was.

3) non-specific, irrealis
Please try somewhere else.

4) polar question
Did anybody tell you anything about it?

5)conditional protasis
If you see anything, tell me immediately.

6) standard of comparison
In Freiburg the weather is nicer than anywhere in Germany.

7) direct negation
Nobody knows the answer.

8) indirect negation
I don't think that anybody knows the answer.

9) free choice
Anybody can solve this simple problem.

He has a 40 language sample, and in Appendix A, describes how these
40 languages divide up those 9 functions among their various series
pronouns. It seems that languages range between 2 to 7 divisions,
often with overlap. He also draws data from a larger 100 language
sample.

He also mentions that indefinite pronouns are, as a rule, derived
forms. He then goes on to talk about Esperanto:

<quote>
As a rule, Esperanto grammar follows the typological design of
Standard Average European, eliminating irregularities and 'useless'
features like gender and agreement. There are two indefinite series
in Esperanto, which are clearly related to interrogative pronouns,
much as in many natural languages:

[table of Esperanto pronouns]

A priori, it seems logical that the indefinite meaning should be
expressed by a maximally unmarked form, as in the Esperanto series iu
'someone', io 'something', etc. After all, indefiniteness is not a
concrete, positive meaning that can be easily described. Instead,
indefiniteness seems to be very similar to the absence of any meaning
at all; and from this point of view it makes sense to give indefinite
pronouns a maximally unmarked form.

However, natural languages that are structured like Esperanto in this
respect are virtually unattested. I am not aware of a clear case in
which an indefinite pronoun is formally unmarked with respect to a
marked interrogative pronoun. With respect to its indefinite pronoun
system, Esperanto is thus probably not a possible human language. The
derived nature of indefinite pronouns is one of the cross-linguistic
observations that call for an explanation.
</quote>

Etc, etc. Very interesting book, actually, with lots of data.

-Sylvia
who is still figuring out how Kélen divides up these 9 functions...

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
sylvia1@ix.netcom.com

The Kélen language can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html

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