Re: Question about case names...

At 12:13 PM -0400 12/13/98, Sally Caves wrote:
>On Sun, 13 Dec 1998, Sam Bryant wrote:
>
>> Alright. I'm making a three-way distinction in LH:
>> -subject of transitive verbs
>> -subject of intransitive verbs
>> -object of transitive verbs.
>>
>> I'd like to call these ergative, nominative, accusative respectively.
>>But that
>> will probably deeply offend people's sensibilities. I could use agentive,
>> nominative, accusative. But under no circumstances will I call one of my
>>cases
>> agent, patient, or absolutive.
>> What do y'all think?
>
>What I think is that you first have to identify what general type your
>language is before you can mix nominative and ergative like this, or
>so I've come to understand in my lengthy discussions of this topic with
>various sage members of this listserv.  Accusative languages have
>transitive subjects, but we don't call them "ergative."  And ergative
>languages have transitive objects but we don't call them "accusative."
>Nominative/Accusative is the nomenclature we use for languages that
>make this major distinction and Ergative/Absolutive is used for languages
>that make THIS distinction.
Well, this kind of language is the type that doesn't have a well-accepted
name 3-way might be my current favorite.

>But hey, you can break whatever rules you
>want in your invented language, but you'll probably get grumbling from
>those who think you are using these terms indiscriminately or without
>thought to the structure of your conlang.
My take would be that using any terms you want as part of a language
description is OK -- but you need to clearly define the terms you've chosen
for your own langauge so that people who haven't seen them will know that
your senses are unusual.

Sam, you might stick with ergative, absolutive, and use the term
"subjective" for the subject of intransitive verbs. That's reminiscent of
the S role's name, since your system has distinct cases for the  A, P, S
functional roles.

Or you could use terms in your own language as part of the terminology, as
Lojban does. They might not even analyze grammatical roles in the same way
that we would!

  -- David

I've always wanted to explore con-grammatical theories for my conlangs...
I've never even come close to being able to do that, because I can never
get enough of the grammar and vocab fixed.

Also, the time I've spent on traditional linguistics makes it easier for me
to communicate my ideas, but also harder to re-analyze everything in some
new terms. Even if my linguistic knowledge is eccentric [a mix of
Gleason-era structuralism, 70's Chomskyanism, 80's GPSG and Unification
theories, and odd bits of functional, descriptive and a taste of
tagmemics], I'm still in the formalist tradition of Anglo-American
linguistics [if that's a correct way to generalize over those competing
traditions].

I think people get huffy at theroretical claims (if they disagree) or use
of standard terminology in non-standard ways, when it's not made clear that
the usages are non-standard.

Artlanging (at least) is art, and you have to do it as your taste and
principles demand.
_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\  http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW                    \__________________________