Re: THEORY: Why more than two grammatical relations?

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:13:51 -0400, Eldin Raigmore wrote:

>The participants in a clause are split two ways.  Semantically they can be
>Arguments or Adjuncts; grammatically they can be Core or Oblique.
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.

>One way that works in some languages to distinguish Core arguments from
>Oblique arguments is this; if it's a Core argument, its semantic role cannot be
>determined just by examining the noun or pronoun or the noun phrase or the
>adpositional phrase; instead one must also consult the verb (usually, the form
>of the verb (usually, the grammatical voice of the verb)).  But if it's an
>Oblique, its semantic role is completely determined by the form of the pronoun
>or noun and/or noun phrase and/or adpositional phrase.
This seems to be a rather fuzzy distinction, not a binary one, so there will
be a continuum between more core phrases and more oblique phrases. Consider
that even the semantics of prepositional arguments may depend on the
context, e.g. "Homer trembled with anger" (cause/mode) vs. "Homer agreed
with Lisa" (comitative?) or "the  consisted of one room" (part) vs. "the dog
died of love" (cause) or "Bart benefitted from school" (cause) vs. "Bart
stole from school" (patiens?). And I think the semantics depend more on the
meaning of the verb than on its form, compare "the mob gathered" (subject
results from action), "Milhouse sickened" (subject suffers action), "Mr.
Burns 'excellent' closed the meeting" (instrumental subject – not sure
whether that's grammatical in English; it is in German), "a change happened"
(subject defines the action), "it rains" (empty subject).


>For purposes of interpreting what I'm saying on this thread, you can
>assume "Core case" is synonymous with "Grammatical Adverbial case"
>and "Oblique case" is synonymous with "Semantic case".
Ah, I can understand these words more easily (though I wonder what the
difference would be that goes beyond the purposes here...)!


>A Semantic case specifies its noun's semantic role, thematic role, theta-role,
>deep case, or case-role.  A Grammatical case specifies its noun's Grammatical
>Relation.
After some reading, I guess that the grammatical relation of a constituent
is the class it belongs to with respect to grammatical phenomena such as
agreement, word order, ommissions in coordinated sentences or reflexives?
That'd mean that grammatical relations depend on the language (that is
confirmed by your question that their number may vary). However, I still
don't understand the term sufficiently because I don't see how a grammatical
relation differs from a case, or if you will, from an adpositional phrase.
And this is precisely the point where quirkiness seems to originate, if I
understand it correctly: A quirky case is where the overt case marking
differs from the usual "grammatical relation" of that case.

An important reason why you believed the examples of dative and genitive
objects of my first post in this thread to be "quirky objects" seems to be
that they can be transformed into passive voice without changing their case:

1. Sie gedenkt seiner. – Seiner wird gedacht.
she commemorates him.GEN – him.GEN becomes commemorated 'he is commemorated'

However, I think that this instance of passive voice is less similar to the
passive voice of transitive verbs (by which I mean here simply a verb that
governs an accusative object) than to the passive voice of certain
intransitive verbs:

2. Sie arbeitet dort. – Dort wird gearbeitet.
she works there – there becomes worked 'people work there/you work there
(impersonal)'

Here the passive of a transitive verb:

3. Sie findet ihn. – Er wird gefunden.
she finds him.ACC – he becomes found 'he is found'

There are several hints to a greater resemblance between 1. and 2. than
between 1. and 3. (apart from the obvious change in case marking in 3.):

– The intransitive passives of 1. and 2. easily take a "Platzhalter-es"
('placeholder-it'). This is an empty grammatical 3rd person singular neutrum
pronoun 'it' (as in "it rains") that takes the place before the verb if no
other constituent or conjunction takes that place: "Es wird seiner gedacht";
"es wird dort gearbeitet". In 3. this seems less likely: *"Es wird er gefunden".

– The intransitive passives of 1. and 2. are always third person singular,
whereas 3. agrees with the subject. Examples: "Eurer wird gedacht"
you.pl.GEN become.3rd.sing commemorated 'you are commemorated' vs. "ihr
werdet gefunden" you.pl.NOM become.2nd.pl found 'you are found'.

– The intransitive passives of 1. and 2. are less likely to have an
acceptable "Zustandspassiv" ('state passive'). That is another German
passive construction with a different auxiliary and expresses kind of an
imperfective aspect as opposed to the kind of perfective aspect of the usual
passive. Examples: *"Seiner ist gedacht" him.GEN is commemorated; *"dort ist
gearbeitet" there is worked '?'; but acceptable: "Er ist gefunden" he.NOM is
found 'he is a found-one'. (Compare Duden Grammatik §318ff.)

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, but that seems to be a poor justification for quirkiness
because for the same rationale, every adpositional argument would be another
quirky object, so there would be a quirkiness inflation. But I don't claim I
have much insight in that subject, so please correct me if I got it wrong. I
just have sneaked around in the discussions here, and then I've tried to
understand some of "Quirky “subjects” and other specifiers" by Gisbert
Fanselow, though I had a hard time understanding any of it since my
knowledge of generativist terminology is very limited:
http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~fanselow/d/files/fs_fanselow.pdf


>For you to answer my question I suspect I do need you to understand GRs.
Well, there. I'll have another try anyway: 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 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. The
"datives" of the romance languages of Southern and Western Europe would be a
little less "oblique" because they often agree with the verb. I guess that
in languages with many cases, most would be very "oblique". Or like this:
The more grammatical relations, the more oblique. But that's just some
speculation of mine.


>I don't think you really need to understand "quirky case" to answer my
>question, but it's kind of fun anyway.
Sure it's fun!

---
grüess
mach
"... ììc aper fìgges šöön, tas mis pé-pfoorlöiffic no ké houztéħħu hétt, u
tasi cégg no ter hìmu xee, fröippmi trùm téšp-mee..."