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Re: nom/accu pronouns erg/abs everything else

From:Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...>
Date:Monday, May 14, 2007, 15:32
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)...
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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...
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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 -- Using Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/mail/

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David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>
David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>