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Re: Fluid-S pivot in Old Albic

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, August 10, 2005, 21:21
Joerg wrote:
> > 1.) Are you aware of any natlangs that have any parts of Old Albic's > > system? > > Of the languages I know of, Georgian seems to come closest to it > (I even seem to remember reading about a fluid-S pivot in Georgian, > but I am not sure)
It's a little more complicated than that in Georgian. In the present and aorist series, there is a standard accusative pivot: intransitives always obligatorily corefer with the agent of a transitive clause. The trick is in the perfect series, where indeed there seems to be a fluid-S pivot. What's more, it seems to be sensitive to discourse structure, since when you focus the object to OSV order, suddenly only an accusative pivot (which is weird, since if it were just pragmatically determined you'd expect that focusing the object would force a Split-S rather than Fluid-S pivot). So, I would say that the Georgian facts are not so close. I seem to vaguely remember that Acehnese has some odd pivot facts like this; check out Yehuda Falk's _Explaining Subjecthood_ (which is available for free in PDF format on his website). As far as I know, no one but me has done research on Georgian pivots, so I'm your likely source on that factoid. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637

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Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>