Re: Questions Concerning Grammar

From:    Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
> 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.
No, that's actually not what I meant at all.  I had said in that
post that the syntactic pivot of a language may have nothing to do
with how an argument is case-marked.  In this case, I was assuming
that the implied subject of _ran_ was _they_, in whatever case. I was
just trying to explain one way of topic-marking, where the topic-marker
and case-markers are in complimentary distribution.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637