Re: THEORY: Non-nom Subj & Nom Obj -- Quirky OVS Word Order Or Quirky Case?

Hello, Christopher, and everyone.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Christopher Wright <dhasenan@G...>
> wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Aug 2005 18:29:03 -0000, tomhchappell <tomhchappell@Y...>
> wrote:
[HENRIK'S LAST NAME IS THEILING; SORRY I MIS-SPELLED IT]

> >Hello everyone, especially Tom Wier, Henrik Thieling, and Markus
> >Miekk-Oja.
Sorry, Henrik.  Theiling, not Thieling, right?
I hope that didn't delay your answer, if you have one.

[IS THERE AN ANSWER FROM BASIC LINGUISTIC THEORY?]

> This is long and assumes some knowledge of syntax.
> If you want, I can
> probably create a brief explanation of the important stuff
> and toss it up on
> my webspace, but you probably know enough.
> And if not, Wikipedia should have
> enough.
> [snip]
> >Here's the thing; Why aren't these sentences in
> > an admittedly unusual
> >OVS word order, rather than having quirky cases?
> In order for that to happen, you'd need a few things to happen:
> 1. Nominative case would have to be assigned to a subject in
> its base position.
> 2. Either the base position for subjects would have to be below*
> (c-commanded by) the verb, or the verb would have to move
> above the base
> position for the subject.
> 3. The object would have to be assigned case from the verb as usual.
Thank you, Chris.

Does anyone have an explanation from, and/or in the terms of, what
Matthew Dryer calls "'basic linguistic theory' (following R. M. W.
Dixon)"? http://wings.buffalo.edu/soc-
sci/linguistics/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/blt

[POSSIBLE REASONS FOR A 'QUIRKY' OVS SENTENCE IN A SVO LANGUAGE]

I can think of two, besides just "allow[ing] [the] verb to decide
the word order of [the] sentence at so basic a level", as Chris says.

One is a possible "animate arguments first" rule;
the other is the "stylistic" inversion Chris mentioned.

--ANIMACY HIERARCHY

In many languages the most "animate" argument
has to be mentioned first, regardless of its thematic-role.
I'm sorry I can't think of the name of the language
or of the paper I saw it in or of the author of the paper;
but: in some North Amerind language,
hawks are more animate than foxes, so if a fox catches a hawk,
the hawk has to be mentioned first
even though it's the patient and the fox is the agent.

So in a "My boss(DAT) Cadillacs(NOM) lician" type sentence,
we would be mentioning my boss first,
because he is more animate than the Cadillac.
(Of course you wouldn't say that if you ever met my boss,
unless you met him near his Cadillac.)

> [snip]
> It's possible--compare it to stylistic inversion.
> It would have to be
> optional, though--
> no theory that I know of allows a verb to decide the word
> order of a sentence at so basic a level.
> So you could simply say 'If it's
> optional,
> it's OVS surface word order from stylistic inversion; otherwise,
> it's quirky case.'
>
> There's more to it than that. Check the theta roles:
> is the first noun
> phrase the agent or experiencer in a regular,
> unemphasized sentence? If so,
> then it's extremely likely to be quirky case.
> Otherwise, it's more likely to
> be stylistic inversion or semantic case
> (semantic case is present before we
> even begin to think about syntax,
> so it can pretty much bypass this discussion).
--STYLISTIC INVERSION

The English switch from SOV to SVO was brought about partly by a
stylistic preference for using an alternate SVO word order in certain
circumstances.
Among the conditioning variables were;
*Is or is not the clause the last in a series of co-ordinately
conjoined clauses?
*Is the clause a main clause or a sub-ordinate clause?
http://www.tutorpal.com/Our_English/middle_english/mem.html
has this to say :
"clauses: trend toward modern word order,
SVO in affirmative independent clauses;
SOV when object was pronoun, in dependent clauses, with compound
tenses;
VSO in questions and imperatives;
OSV/OVS emphasizing direct object or complement;
required subject, use of dummy subjects there and it"

> [snip]
> Why should you care which it is?
> Well, stylistic inversion usually involves
> moving the verb higher than the subject,
> then moving the object higher than
> the verb;
a. I didn't know that!
b. Why does all stylistic inversion have to have both those steps,
and done in just that order?

> and it's always optional (or forbidden, but never required).
This is the only feature of Stylistic Inversion
that I'm pretty sure doesn't apply
to the Icelandic and German "like" examples in Sigurdsson's paper.
I don't know those languages well enough,
but I got the impression those word-orders were required,
not optional.

> This alters the positions of modifiers
> (adverbs and adverbial prepositional phrases).
I think the examples I was asking about would obey
this rule of Stylistic Inversion, if that is what they are.

> Also, if you have an auxiliary or modal 'verb', that will be moved
> instead of the content verb.
AFAIK the examples I was asking about are not disqualified from being
Stylistic Inversion by this rule, either.

> This all works for SVO languages.
> OVS languages are different;
> I haven't looked into them much,
> but either they're
> SOV languages that move the predicate
> (so you get indirect objects before the verb),
> or they're
> SOV/SVO languages that move the verb up and then the object
> (so it's possible to have indirect objects after the subject).
I could interpret what you're saying as:
"Native L1-speakers of OVS languages
actually compose their utterances as SOV or SVO in their heads,
then invert most of them before saying them out loud".
If that's so, speaking an OVS language must be a lot of effort,
even for a native speaker.
No wonder they're so rare.

On the other hand, that's probably not what you meant.
In which case, what did you mean?

I haven't looked at any OVS or OSV languages either.
All I know about them is "they are about as rare as hen's teeth".
I don't even know if any Object-First languages have Quirky Case.
Does anyone on the list know?

[NOTE:  I was really asking for natlangs; but, if tlHiNgaan has
quirky case, feel free to mention it.]

[REANALYSIS OF "LICIAN"'S ARGUMENT-FRAME TO "LIKE"'S]

In http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~garrett/DIGS2004.pdf
"Syntactic Change as Language Change"
Andrew Garrett says among other things:

"As he [David Lightfoot] observes
here [1988, "Syntactic Change", "The Cambridge Linguistic Survey",
ed by Frederick Newmeyer, Vol 1] and elsewhere,
an essential part of the Jespersen account is that
verbs such as /like/ [/lician/] must have been used in OVS sentences
often enough to allow reanalysis.
An example of the relevant type is in (2).
(2) ac  gode     ne licode na heora geleafleast   ...
    But God(DAT) did not like their unbelief(NOM) ...
(AEHom 21.68)"

Garrett also mentions Jespersen's idea that
human arguments would be likely to be
mentioned before inanimate arguments,
thus accounting for the more frequent use of
the variant OVS word-order with a verb such as "lician"
than verbs such as "kill", "see", or "love".
He suggests that
when English's case system got restricted to pronouns,
and English's word-order got changed to SVO
and became pretty strict about it,
"lician"'s argument-structure was re-analyzed.

> [snip]
I ran out of time to talk about the
Government-and-Binding and Minimalist-Program
takes on this.
I'm not sure I would have understood them anyway.

But, at any rate, it looks like Andrew Garrett may be
a person who might have asked this sort of question before;
or, perhaps, Cynthia Allen or another one of his sources has.

Thank you.

Tom H.C. in MI

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