Re: Tirelat's newly found activeness

On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 23:27:53 +0100, daniel andreasson
<daniel.andreasson@...> wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> Syntax is also active, if that means what I think it does: the subject of
>> an intransitive verb precedes it if it is an agent, and follows it if it is
>> a patient.
>
>Yes, partly that. Dixon writes that the unmarked case is most likely
>the leftmost in a clause. The question is which case is the unmarked in
>an active lang.
I thought the agent tended to be first even in ergative languages. In any
case, both cases in Tirelat are marked.

>But I also wonder how Tirelat handles complementation, relativisation,
>coordination and other syntactic operations.
Everything in Tirelat syntax is either a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or
a grammatical particle that marks the function of words and holds phrases
together. So a relative clause, for instance, is formally a prepositional
phrase that functions as an adjective. Tirelat specifically has a
conjunction "te" that joins two verbs. Complementation isn't something that
I've dealt with yet, mainly because I've been avoiding it so far.

>I don't quite get the whole thing yet, but here's what Kibrik writes
>on the subject of syntactically active languages:
>
>"Such a language should syntactically treat Actors in one way, and
>Undergoers in another. For example, it could have an interclausal
>switch reference rule for cross-clause coreference: the chain of
>coreferent Actors (A+A) would have the clausal marker SAME, while the
>chains of coreferent pairs (U+U, A+U, U+A), could have the marker
>DIFFERENT."
>
>He gives the examples:
>
>A+A   'He came and said.'      = SAME
>U+U   'He fell and died.'      = DIFFERENT
>A+U   'He came and died.'      = DIFFERENT
>U+A   'He fell and jumped up.' = DIFFERENT
>
>I'm not sure why U+U wouldn't be treated the same way as A+A with
>such a rule.
Me neither. "Fell and died he" sounds fine to me. But "He came and died"
can only mean "he came and killed" (!) in Tirelat (agent of death =
killer).

>About coordination, I don't think it's possible to use an anti-passive
>construction, just like ergative langs. To express a sentence
>(UND = Undergoer, ACT = Actor):
>
>   'I (UND) fell and you (ACT) saw me (UND).'
>
>you could leave out 'me', leaving: 'I fell and you saw'. Since
>'I' and 'me' are both Undergoers, similar to ergative syntax.
>But if you wanted to say
>
>   'I (ACT) jumped and you (ACT) saw me (UND).'
>
>you can't leave out 'me' since it's not an Actor. You can't use
>anti-passive to turn 'you saw me' into an intransitive clause,
>because 'I' and 'me' would still have different roles.
>
>You also can't use the passive '...and I was seen by you' for
>the same reason.
>
>I'm not sure how to do this, but perhaps one possible solution is
>the above-mentioned construction with SAME and DIFFERENT.
>
>   'I (ACT) jumped and you (ACT) saw-DIFF.'
>
>might then imply a 'me'-Undergoer at the end of the sentence.
>
>What do you think? Perhaps Matt Pearson might be of help here?
Well, in this case "I jumped and you saw" seems fine, although I think it
really ends up meaning "I jumped and you saw [my act of jumping]". To make
it more explicit, I'd rather just add "me" than using the "DIFF"
construction.

--
languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
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