Re: ergative? I don't know...
| From: | Mathias M. Lassailly <lassailly@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, October 26, 1998, 16:34 |
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David wrote :
At 8:02 AM -0400 10/26/98, Mathias M. Lassailly wrote:
> >Nik wrote :
> >
> >David G. Durand wrote:
> >> > A, S, P together: rare system, no case or dependable syntactic
> >>marking of
> >> > argument roles. I've never seen examples of this, but it's claimed to
> >> > exist, and depends heavily on context or paraphrase to distinguish agent
> >> > and patient.
> >Regarding the number of arguments (A, P, S...) a specific system (nom/acc,
> >erg/abs, age/pat) implies, I think it's precisely a matter of how many
> >'applicatives' the definition of the predicate implies. For example, you
> >say in English 'I protect my chidren from the wolf' and you think that
> >'from the wolf' is 'added' as a third argument, not necessarily implied
> >('applicated') in 'to protect'. Now in Japanese you have '(watashi wa)
> >kodomo ni ookami wo fusegu' so Japanese consider that the verb 'fusegu'
> >implies a third argument, which they never feel as 'third in ranking'
> >since being accusative it is actually the second so 'fusegu' it often
> >mistaken for 'to fend off' by foreigners. 'accusative' or 'indirect
> >object' is only a deixis, a feeling as to what argument we think is CLOSER
> >to the process. A mere question of spatial reference and nothing more.
> >Another African language I can't remember which one would always consider
> >the instrument to protect (shield, weapon, shelter) as!
> > a!
> > fourth 'applicative' argument implied in the predicate. So this is only a
> >matter of semantics (yes, here I go again. ouch ! not on my glasses ! :-).
>
> I think that we're in the throes of a misunderstanding, which my post of
> last night may point the way to unravelling. I'll repeat it, since
> restating the argument helps me to understand it.
>
> In the Anglo-American school of comparative linguistics that Nik and I are
> promulgating, there are 3 levels of description. [I'd like to note that in
> my case, at least, I'm explaining this theory because it helps me make up
> languages, not because I have deep theoretical commitments to the theory. I
> have noted several places where the analysis is incomplete, and I think
> most working linguists, even in this tradition, would agree with me.]
>
> The 3 levels are semantic roles, syntactic functions, and grammatical cases.
>
> Semantic roles are things like: Actor (sometimes "agent" in confusing and
> sloppy writers like myself), Destination, Instrument, Location, Patient,
> etc. These are defined by the semantics of an action (as interpreted by a
> human) and are invariant across processes like passivization, etc. They are
> the underlying reality being expressed by the language. I have very light
> presuppositions at this level, as I believe that the philosophical and
> empirical ground is still so unclear that even lengthy discussion will
> never converge on an answer. If this were a forum on linguistic philosophy,
> then I might get into it.
>
> Syntactic functions are an abstraction that allows us to understand the
> realities of many of the most common case systems of human languages. They
> recognize 3 basic roles A, P, and S (the relationship to the terms agent,
> patient, and subject is suggestive, but they're not the same thing as
> either cases or semantic roles). A and P apply to the two arguments of
> transitive clauses, S to the one argument of intransitive clauses. The
> virtue of these constructs is that it lets us talk about the relations
> between case systems of different languages.
>
> Grammatical cases are things like nominative, accusative, ergative, etc.
> The term case is also used (in this kind of comparative work) to refer to
> other ways of marking "case" such as a distinguished position in the
> clause. For instance, in English (excepting pronouns), the "Nominative" is
> really marked by a distinguished position on front of the verb. Cases
> represent a concrete language's method of realizing the syntactic
> functions. Those functions map to underlying roles, by means of some
> language-specific set of voice distinctions.
>
> There's much less agreement on the best way to describe variations in voice
> systems, or indirect cases. Some comparative linguists do add an extra
> letter "I" to represent the syntactic function of _any_ indirect case, and
> they can then express the fact that demoted arguments (e.g.,. Former
> subjects in passive sentences, usually appear in some indirect case).
> Trigger and inverse languages don't fit this framework so well, nor do
> inverse systems like those in the Algonquian languages.
>
> I don't want to engage in a discussion of whether this is a "true" theory
> of meaning, or the extent to which language determines, or reflects
> fundamentally different conceptions of the world. I haven't seen any such
> discussions make progress, so I stay out. I will say that your accusation
> that this analysis is based on English is a bit bizarre. For one thing, the
> functions A, P and S are not distinct in English (subject and object are
> the only two terms needed for English grammar). For another, this is a
> partial descriptive framework used by field linguists, who examine a great
> variety of different languages, and are distinctly non-theoretical in
> Anglo-American linguistics. This kind of explanation serves their purposes
> as language describers (and mine as a constructor of artlangs) while trying
> _not_ to make strong commitments about semantics and grammatical theory.
>
> I recommend, again, Thomas Payne's Describing Morphosyntax as a painless
> introduction to this area. (He does _totally_ mangle his description of
> predicate calculus and logic, which annoys the mathematician (and
> philosopher) in me no end, but actually speaks well of the a-theoretical
> nature of his descriptions).
>
> -- David
>
That's exactly what I learned in the few months I was in my basic linguistics classes
long time ago, but I could not remember that well. Thanks for taking the time
to read my message and to go back to basics much more effenciently than my
professors did then. That must be very annoying. I understand that I was naive
to think that you and Sally could mix up semantic roles (I think it means
French 'simhmes', syntactic functions (French 'foncthmes' ?) and grammatical
cases ('grammhmes' like voices) so as to equate 'actor' and 'agent', or
consider 'instrument' as a grammatical 'secondary case'. I also understand that
you do not discuss ties between voices/cases and semantic roles. Too bad.
I mean : if I were allowed to discuss that point I would say that 'volitional'
in Teohnat sounds to me like a desiderative crammed in a case with a
resultative aspectivation but I can't because aspectivation is part of
semantics :-).
Why do linguists always step out when it comes to the problem of meaning ? Don't
you consider it's underlying and transcending all these neat categories you
mention ? I mean : when you use the word 'fish' in a phrase, you don't mean
fish anymore from the very second you pronounce it, and you mean either 'food'
or 'prey' or 'oil', etc. So had it a role in a sentence, the predicate it
refers to would reciprocally mirror and refer to the semantic role of fish as
'food', 'prey', etc. It's not different from links between parts of 'compound
nouns' or else. That's why I wrote that 'cases' are only a kind of deixis to
me. Maybe I'm wrong. But could you please tell me whose book I should read
about that ?
Mathias
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