Re: Questions Concerning Grammar

From:    william drewery <will65610@...>
> Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> > I don't understand. Surely every language has agents
> > and patients, at some level?
>
>  I'm sorry for the ambiguity. I meant an *active*
> language in the sense of one that can mark the NP of
> an intransitive verb as either subj or obj depending
> on semantics. My brain wasn't working full throttle
> and "agent-patient" is what it came up with.
A word of warning:  hierarchical languages (aka inverse languages)
have also IMHO confusingly and unhelpfully been called "agent-patient"
systems.  It's best to stick to "active-stative" (the traditional
label) or better "split-S"/"fluid-S" languages.

(The latter makes the claim that there is a category "S" for
the single argument of intransitives, which assumes that every
language contrasts transitive versus intransitive sentences. So,
it might beg the question somewhat, but I think it's still better
than "active/stative", which assumes animacy, rather than agency
or volitionality or kinesis etc., is the deciding factor.)

>  Stated more precisely, in an active type of
> language, how does the coreferencing/anaphore binding
> work in a sentence such as:
>  "they saw the dog and __ ran"?
The way the syntactic pivot works is an autonomous  system from
that for case marking.  I would guess most Split-S languages do
not have Split-S pivots.

> Also, in a language which uses topic prominent
> sentences (like Chinese) but has absolute/ergative
> case marking, how should the semantics of the above
> sentence work assuming "they" to be the topic and
> ergative?
Depends.  Is this language also pro-drop?

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.)

 =========================================================================
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

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