Re: Questions Concerning Grammar

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 20:59:06 -0700, william drewery <will65610@...> wrote:
> >
> > I'm more familiar with the way topicality works in
> > Korean.  There,
> > the topic marker and the subject marker are in
> > complimentary
> > distribution.  You can mark the subject as topic, or
> > as subject,
> > but not both.  Thus:
> >
> >    (a) They-TOP saw the dog-ABS and ___ ran.
> >    (b) They-ERG saw the dog-ABS and ___ ran.
> >    (c) *They-TOP-ERG saw the dog-ABS and ___ ran.
> >
> > (Korean's nom/acc, but you get the idea.)
>   If I understand this right, "they" is the assumed
> argument of "ran"?
I interpreted is as having "they" as the assumed argument of "ran" in
(a) (since it's marked as the topic), "the dog" as the assumed
argument of "ran" in (b) (since it's in the absolutive case, which is
the unmarked case), and that (c) is ungrammatical.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>