Re: Evolution of Applicatives

>By 'applicative', I assume you mean a structure like
>'I on-slept the mat' for 'I slept on the mat'? As I
>understand it, the applicative in many languages is
>carried out by dropping the valency of a sentence by
>one through making the complement a direct object, and
>encoding any specific information relevant to the
>complement on the verb (or something like that).
>
That is indeed what I meant.... :) Although not all applicatives must decrease
valence: some languages allow the Patient to be retained even though another
argument has been promoted to direct object position or marking, or so
"Describing Morphosyntax" says. :) Whether they sometimes mark both as the
direct object, or always adopt some different case marking/position/other for
the Patient, I don't know, but I know that Swahili uses an applicative type
marking in ditransitive clauses, and in that case the direct object may be
retained and simply follows the Recipient that has been promoted to direct
object position in the clause.

>Structures that faintly resemble the applicative
>appear in German, thanks to the wonky flip-flopping of
>word order in certain clauses:
>
>"Ich habe die Bandagen mir abgezogen."
>"I have the.PLU bandages me.DAT off-pulled."
>"I pulled the bandages off from me."
>
>But then again, to analyze that sentence as an
>applicative would be very contrived indeed. However,
>it's concievable that a simple phrase like 'I slept on
>the mat' could, over time, shift its word order around
>a bit and be reanalyzed as 'I on-slept the mat'. It's
>possible, certainly, but I haven't seen it happen in
>any language I know.
>
I suppose this is possible... but some of the examples that I have seen, the
applicative affixes are buried inside the verb with other affixes on either
side. That was kindof what I had in mind, since the verb in the language I'm
currently designing takes inflectional (ie required) prefixes and suffixes. If
the derivation was done by adding the preposition onto the infinitive and then
adding the necessary suffixes then it wouldn't be too bad, but following the
suggested route this doesn't seem too likely and I'm not keen on the
applicatives occuring with person or TAM marking separating them from the verb
stem. I suppose if I have to I could reshuffle my verbal affixes.

>As for ergative languages with applicatives, I wonder
>how that could happen. My conlang, Gi-nàin, is a
>fluid-S language with an applicative, which might be
>close enough to count:
>
>"mara-s'a a-t e-kias-se-i"
>boat.<patient> I/you.<agent> at.stepped
>"I/You stepped into _the boat_."
>
>Gi-nàin generally only uses the applicative in
>situations like these, where it has to break with its
>typical SOV word order to emphasize a specific element
>(in this case, the boat, hence the underscoring).
>
This example is interesting. I might have to change back to an accusative type
system though, to have applicatives, which wouldn't be too bad I guess.

>The non-applicative equivalent, "mara-je a-t
>kias-se-i" doesn't suggest movement into the boat;
>i.e., it would be parsed as 'I stepped _at_ the boat',
>a sentence that would make almost no sense in Gi-nàin.
>
>I know Fablo David Flores has the applicative in at
>least one of his conlangs, or at least, knows more
>about the valency operations than I do.
>
Fingers crossed he answers. :)

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