Re: THEORY: Why more than two grammatical relations?

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 14:47:54 -0400, Eldin Raigmore wrote:

>>The distinction of arguments and adjuncts is familiar
>>to me, though I didn't know the English terms. I
>>used "complement" as an ad-hoc translation
>>for 'argument' in my last post. The distinction of
>>core and oblique, however, is new to me.
>
>These ideas, themselves, are parts of most theories.
>But the terms I've used for them are theory-specifc, and not all specific to the
>same theory.
That might be, but then I just have a quite different background with Germanistic linguistics.
For one, linguistics in another language, not in English, so there are other traditions, and then,
linguistics of one specific language.


>Well, I know that the philosophy behind Keenan's "Subject Properties List" is
>that syntactic subjecthood is fuzzy or a continuum; but I'd never heard before
>that the "core vs oblique" distinction was.  (Nor that it wasn't; I've just not
>been told much about that.)
If it is syntactic properties such as "subjecthood" or "objecthood" what makes a certain form
belong to the core, and these properties are fuzzy, then I guess, it also will be fuzzy what
belongs to the core or not.


>>From that I'd say that there's nothing quirky about
>>German dative or genitive objects with intransitive
>>verbs except that they are the verb's only object,
>
>Well, unless the genitive marking or adposition is just like some GR's marking or
>adposition, the genitive is always a quirky way to mark a GR, because the
>genitive is an adnominal case, and GRs are usually marked with adverbial
>syntactic cases.
That might be so in some theories, but I think that's a poor explanation for the German genitive
(and as far as I know the same goes for the genitives in other Indoeuropean languages).


>>It seems to me that the German dative is not much
>>different from the English prepositional phrases
>>with "to". The semantics are quite predictable. Both
>>can occur as the second argument of an intransitive
>>verb, for instance "she listened to him" – "sie hörte
>>ihm zu" she.NOM listened him.DAT [detached part of
>>the verb]. Incidently, both languages may use these
>>as a replacement of constructions with double
>>transitive
>
>("ditransitive")
>
>>verbs (in German only in special cases, though), for
>>instance "she teached him a trick" – "sie lehrte ihn
>>einen Trick" she.Nom teached him.ACC a trick.ACC. The
>>involvement in grammatical phenomena is quite low, so
>>I'd say both the English to-phrases and German dative
>>would be more "oblique" by your definition than
>>nominative and accusative.
>
>I didn't know English and German were so similar in this regard.
>
>Recipients are human goals, so the semantics of the dative and the allative
>are similar; so it's no surprise that one of the ways of indicating the recipient
>in English and German is by using the allative adposition ("to" oder "zu").
That seems to be a misunderstanding. German doesn't use a construction with "zu" as a
replacement, but the dative. Therefore, I said that there is a parallel between the German
dative and the English construction with "to". However, that replacement is less common than
in English. The Duden grammar notes a "tendency" toward that replacement and illustrates it
by literary quotes that show dative-accusative instead of ditransitive double accusative, and it
notes that especially when the non-human goal is passivized, the use of the dative for the
human goal has become quite common, for instance:

"Ihm wurden viele Tricks gelehrt."
him.DAT became.3rd.pl many tricks.NOM taught
'Many tricks were taught to him.'


>>The more grammatical relations, the more oblique.
>
>Not sure what you meant.
>Perhaps something like:
>"The more GRs a language has, the less distinction it makes between the 'later'
>GRs and oblique arguments."?
Something like that.


---
grüess
mach

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