Re: Fluid-S pivot in Old Albic

Hi!

# 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> writes:
> All the examples of the pivots in various languages using "The man
> threw the ball and fell" or another intransitive verb are interesting,
> but what if the second verb is transitive?
Jörg showed that in Old Albic, both arguments of transitives will then
borrow the argument from the first clause.  (And I said I think this
is the case in Kalaallisut, two, but could not give examples, so you
may safely ignore this until I give or someone else gives an example...)

And usually in natlangs that have pivots, one argument may be elided
while the other one must be mentioned (unless they are pro-drop).
E.g. for nominative pivot, the nominative argument may be elided, the
accusative must be given.  For ergative pivot, the ergative may be
elided, and the absolutive one must be given.  And for subject pivot
(Icelandic) the subject may be elided and the other core argument must
be given.  Etc.

And maybe there are pro-drop langs with pivot, where one of the
arguments unambiguously refers back to the first clause while the
other one must be deduced from context.

E.g. while Qthyn|gai is pro-drop, it still has a tendency towards
topic pivot if present and otherwise towards fluid-S pivot.  But I
haven't worked out the system cleanly and thoroughly yet.

> Like, "The man threw the ball and hit" that, in english, would need an
> object for "hit" to be grammatical. ...
Only 'hit' can be used intransitively, too, so that's really
grammatical.  There's probably a problem in English constructing such
sentences since the object is almost always optional.  Anyway, I see
your point and assume the above 'hit' is meant to be transitive only.

> But a language could have a
> meaning like "The man threw the ball and [the man] hit [the ball]" ...
That's what Old Albic does, I think.  And 'hit' would be head-marked
for both agent and patient arguments.

> or, more strangely, because it uses the opposite agent-patient
> roles, "The man threw the ball and [the ball] hit [the man]".
Depends on how the language selects the agent.  Tyl Sjok would use
control, so the man is still the agent.

> Are there languages that would have one of the two meaning?
Natlangs?  Hmm -- I'll search for my Greenlandic grammar...

Anyway, for a different reason, in Chinese, Japanese and Korean I'd
predict the sentence to be grammatical, but that's because they
are pro-drop.

**Henrik