Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

On 20 Jan 2005, at 8.04 am, # 1 wrote:

>> > > Niuean, a Polynesian language, has a grammar that some call
>> ergative,
>> > > yet it typically uses no verb inflections at all (though some
>> verbs >
>> > change form depending on number -- I can't remember offhand whether
>> > >
>> they agree with the agent, patient, either, or both). > > > > Case is
>> marked on the arguments of the verb with particles. > > Oh yes, now I
>> remember that most Polynesian langs are considered ergative! > Thank
>> you
>> for the information. Anyway, it looks like I'm going to enjoy >
>> polypersonalism for my newest project, as the main sources of its >
>> inspiration use it! > > -- Yitzik
>>
>> Chechen is ergative and has verbal desinences, yet it is not
>> polypersonnal.
>> On the other hand a features of French (definitely accusative) can be
>> considered polypersonnal.
>
> Wich feature are you talking about?
>
> French verbs never agrees with object or agent, only with the subject
> in
> person and number: it is not polypersonnal at all...
>
> I'm not even sure that French can be called "accusative" because there
> are
> no markings or whatever and only the order makes the difference
Difference in order is sufficient; accusative doesn't mean there's an
accusative case, but rather the subject of a transitive verb is
expressed in the same manner as the subject of an intransitive verb,
such as in English. (ish, other people can probably explain it better)

> And, contrarily to english, there is not a really solid distinction
> nominative-accusative in pronouns, because the pronoun will vary in
> form and
> position if it is the direct or the indirect object or if the object
> is an
> enumeration with pronouns
Actually, if anyone told you that English has a solid
nominative--accusative distinction in pronouns, they were lying.
Examples to the contrary include 'It's me', 'John and me went to the
milkbar', 'between you and I'. I think also that normally when there's
a strong nom./acc. distinction, the pronoun-in-isolation form is the
nominative, whereas in English you'd use the so-called object-form
(-'Who would?' -'Me!').

I think you'll probably find that analyses of spoken French and spoken
(informal?) English are both behind the times.

> so I'd like if you coud explain what you mean by that French
> polypersonnal
> feature?
Christophe can :)

And he also wrote:

> Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
>> > >   Moi j'l'aime bien ce film.
>> > >       --------
>> > >       ^
>> > >        \_ verb with subject & object agreement
>> > >
>> >
>> > That is not the same thing that's a contraction of 2 pronouns
>>
>> Please read Christoph's explanations in the archives, he's French and
>> he's a linguist and he's surely more competent on this matter than I
>> am.
Christophe's a linguist? I could've sworn he was a physicist!

>> Arguing with me is futile. :-)
>
> With me too :-P
>
> I'd like to know where is that archive, could you give me the website
> where
> it is?
The archives are at <http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/conlang.html>;
you can also talk to <listserv@...> (begin your
conversation with HELP in an otherwise blank mail). He used at one
stage a free.fr email address, so I searched for 'french polysynth',
substring enabled, authors address contains 'free.fr' (no quotes),
getting
<http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
S2=conlang&q=french+polysynth&0=S&s=&f=free.fr&a=&b=> which should be
quite useful to you. (He might've used a different email address at
another stage, talking about French polysynthesis, so you might try
dropping the authors address field for a larger set of results.)

Lines like 'Yes, you were mistaken (like even the French are) by the
nature of the
French orthography.' remind me of ones very typical of French.

> I'm also a native french speaker so I know what I'm talking about,
> even if
> i'm not a linguist
I think the correct thing to say is actually 'I'm also a native [blah]
speaker, so I *don't* know what I'm talking about'. Unless the French
care more about the grammar of their native language than Australians!

> Roger Mills worte:
>> Christophe's point, as I recall, was always about _spoken_ French, in
>> which
>> "je l'aime" is indeed a phonological unit or "word", /ZlEm/. Note too
>> that
>> the various parts never occur as independent words: /Z/ /l/ (one could
>> say
>> that the schwas are predictable, thus non-phonemic!) /Em/ etc. Also,
>> of
>> course, I like to think he was being only semi-serious :-))))))))
>
> yes these part [Z] and [l] occur in independant words, before a vowel
>
> the schwas are simply dropped before a vowel
If I can quickly summarise what I recall his position to be (I haven't
thoroughly read the results I've picked up, and I might be simplifying
some things---I don't know French!---and anything I say wrong is
obviously the failure of my memory, not Christophe's arguments, so
don't reply to this saying why the argument is wrong (but by all means
go back to the original and do it), only reply saying why I retold it
wrong):
  - firstly, it doesn't matter whether or not the schwa turns up. No-one
claims that the English past tense in 'waited' represents a separated
word, even though it is separated by a schwa from the main word.
  - stress is interesting. French, he claims, only has one primary
stresses  a phrase. I'm not sure to what extent linguists consider
stress when separating words, but I think (in retrospect) he considers
this too important. (I, for instance, often have difficulty separating
the primary and secondary stress in words in English, giving two
syllables essentially the primary stress, which, according to
Christophe's argument---IIUC---means I have two words, not one.)
  - phrases are inseparable as in _je te l'ai bien dit_ [St@,lEbjE~'di]
in pronunciation (no to say that you can't find morpheme boundaries,
just that there's no obvious end of word signs; I presume giving a
narrow phonetic transcription would show lack of things equivalent to
English's aspirated or glotallised and unreleased stops at word
boundaries).
  -  I can't remember more, but anyway, you don't need to think that the
l'- is an inflexion to think that the French verb agrees with its
object; its a signal (which we could call a preposition, a particle or
a pronoun) prefixed before the verb that says: 'Sometime after this
verb, we're going to run into a (masculine?) noun!'.

Interestingly, at one stage recently Thomas Weir mentioned that one
clue to distinguishing between clitics and inflexions is that the
former don't necessarily repeat themselves in a list, whereas the
latter must (for instance, 'I went to the restaurant with John, Jack
and Sally' where 'with' isn't repeated, so with this rule, we with
*only* this rule, it's probably a clitic). At one stage, Christophe
mentioned that he disliked semicolons, whereas I adore them, and so
asked what he did instead. He said that French rarely used them,
preferring to mark list items with the preposition each time: whereas
English might say '... with John, the butcher; Jack, the tailer; Sally;
the greengrocer and the Prime Minister' (five people), French would say
'with John, the butcher, with Jack, the tailer, with Sally, with the
greengrocer and with the Prime Minister'. I don't know if this is at
all relevant!

> a lot of usual words in frensh are only a consonant with a schwa, wich
> will
> be jumped in front of a word beggining with a vowel
Christophe's argument is that this analysis doesn't do justice to the
language, though!

> probably that, if there were less alphabetisation and
> concervatism(concervativeness?) about the orthography and
> pronounciaciation,
conservativism and conservativeness both exist, though my spell checker
insists on highlighting the former so it might only refer to a
political ideology.

> the rule that schwas come to be unpronounced could be added in the
> phonemic
> evolution of french
I don't think the orthography will hold back the pronunciation in this
particular case. In fact, I think it clearly hasn't, based on [St@-]
before being spelt <je te>. I suppose though that in this as other
cases, the colloquial French of France might differ from the French of
Quebec.

HTH! I apologise for any errors.
--
Tristan.

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