Re: nom/accu pronouns erg/abs everything else

On Mon, 14 May 2007 08:14:58 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:

> What about the other categories besides acc and erg (tripartite, mrl,
> etc)?  Do langs typically have only the big two represented?
According to Dixon[1], there's an general "animacy"-based heirarchy of
nominals, with those more likely to be spoken of as agents being more
"animate" (and higher in the heirarchy) than those less likely to be
spoken of as agents, as follows:

1st Person Pronouns
2nd Person Pronouns
Demonstratives and 3rd Person Pronouns equally likely
Proper Nouns
Human Common Nouns
Animate Common Nouns
Inanimate Common Nouns

pp. 85-87 of [1] reads as follows (with my substituting vertical position
in the above list for horizontal positions on his chart)...

>>>
It is plainly more natural and economical to 'mark' a participant when it
is in an unaccustomed role. That is, we could expect that a case-marking
language might provide morphological marking of an NP from the [bottom] of
the heirarchy when it is in A function, and of an NP from the [top] when
in O function (as an alternative to providing ergative marking for *all* A
NPs, of whatever semantic type, or accusative marking for *all* O NPs.

A number of languages have split case-marking exactly on this principle:
and 'ergative' case is used with NPs from the [bottom], up to some point
in the middle of the heirarchy, and an 'accusative' case from that point
on, [up] to the [very top] of the heirarchy. The case marking of Dyirbal
... provides a straightforward example, as shown in [the table below].

A -∅         -Ngu
S -∅         -∅
O -na        -∅
   1st & 2nd  [Everything
   person     else]
   pronouns

Here we have the accusative -na versus the unmarked nominative -∅ for
first and second person pronouns, but ergative -Ngu opposed to the
unmarked absolutive -∅ for [everything else].

We can think of Accusative-marking, extending in from the [top (of the
heirarchy)], and Ergative-marking, coming in from the [bottom], as
essentially independent parameters. They can overlap, so that something in
the middle portion of the heirarchy will have different forms for all
three of the core functions S, A and O. Consider Cashinawa, a Panoan
language from Peru, shown in [the table below].

A -∅         habũ        -~
S -∅         habu        -∅
O -a         haa         -∅
   1st & 2nd  3rd person  nouns
   person     pronoun
   pronouns

In the right-hand column, an NP with a noun as head recieves ergative
marking case marking (realised as nasalisation of the last vowel in the
final word of the NP) when the nouns is in A function, and takes
absolutive case (with zero realisation) when in S or O function. In the
left hand column, first and second person pronouns have an accusative
suffix -a only for O function, and zero marking (nominative case) when in
A or S function. In the middle of the heirarchy, the third person pronoun
has both types of marking, showing three different case forms (note that
the root is 'habu' for S function, with nasalisation added in A function
just as it is for nouns; in O function, the pronomial accusative '-a' is
added to a shorter root 'ha-').

There are many other languages where A and O markings overlap for some
part of the middle of the heirarchy, rather than ergative marking stopping
at the place where accusative begins. Note, though, that the A and O
markings, extending in from opposite ends of the heirarchy, should at
least meet if A and O are to be distinguished by case marking; if they did
not meet other means would have to be employed to distinguish A and O for
the class of NPs that show neither accusative nor ergative affixes, or
else we would simply get ambiguity.
<<<

He goes on to describe the system in Nidinʸ, which seems to be "the same
notion but with more rules", and discusses the ways in which the same
heirarchy is relevant to assigning other markings and category
distinctions in many languages.

He strongly makes the point that the heirarchy is a Universal (big "U"),
though he does eventually caveat the reader with...

>>>
I am not suggesting that the Nominal Heirarchy ... will explain every
detail of split marking in every language. There are always likely to be
odd exceptions. Just occasionally we get personal names [above]
demonstratives (as in some Australian languages) and there are a few
languages with [2nd person above 1st person] (a number of languages in the
Algonquian family, including Ojibwe and southern Cheyenne). But the
heirarchy does explain the great majority of systems split according to
the nature of the NP.
<<<


[1] http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0521448980




Paul




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