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

Hi!

tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> writes:
> Thanks for writing, Henrik.
Pleasure!

>...
> > IIRC, it was Markus who mentioned this a few days ago.
>
> I remember Markus's answer as being helpful, informative, ...
Nono, he had a posting about different subject structures in German
and Icelandic and I asked what the difference was.  One thing he
mentioned was coordinated clauses (the other thing was reflexives).
But he said by his understanding, German did not allow non-nominative
subjects.  I *currently* disagree, but there are so many strange that
it is possible to convince me with good arguments.

I looked the URLs up: I meant those postings:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0507e&L=conlang&O=A&P=2777
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0507e&L=conlang&O=A&P=3586


>...
> > a2) Ich entsage dem Wein und []  trinke Bier.
> >     NOM         DAT          NOM        ACC.
> >     I   abdicate the wine and [] drink beer.
> >     'I abdicate the wine and [I] drink beer (instead).'
>
> 'Abdicate'?!?  Dang, Germans take soft liquor kind of seriously, huh?
Sure.

Anyway, the verb is a bit antiquated in German and not part of my
active vocab in English, so I had to ask a dictionary for a good
translation.  Maybe it becomes even stranger in English by that.

> > b2) Dem Wein entsage ich und [] trinke Bier.
> >     DAT              NOM               ACC
> >
> > a2') *Ich entsage dem Wein und der Mann spricht []  zu.
> >       NOM         DAT          NOM              DAT
> >      *'I abdicate the wine and the man does justice to [the wine].'
>
> 'Justice', too, huh?
Same here. :-) 'zusprechen' is a funny word and the translation the
dictionary gave for 'dem Wein zusprechen' was 'to do justice to the
wine'.  I'm sure it's strange, too. :-)

>...
> (I assume HTH stands for "(I) Hope That Help(s/ed)".)
Exactly. :-)

> There are four sub-kinds,
> two for accusative/nominative alignments and two for
> ergative/absolutive alignments.
>
> 1) Non-Nominative Subject With Nominative Object
> 2) Non-Accusative Object With Accusative Subject
What's the difference between 1 and 2?  At least there's a non-empty
intersection, namely:

> 5) Are there natlang examples of Accusative Subjects with Nominative
>    Objects in the same clause?
I'm sure Icelandic has it.  Anyway, last time I said 'mig thyrsta',
Ray Brown protested, so I won't do that again...  There *must* be more
subject-like examples.

For other strange case assignments, German has some constructions with
two different roles both taking accusative (of course, I'd expect
Icelandic to also have this):

E.g. 'lehren' - 'to teach':

   Du  lehrst mich das Lesen.
   NOM        ACC  ACC
   You teach  me   the reading
   'You teach me to read.'

'kosten' - 'to cost':

   Der Wein kostet ihn den ganzen Lohn.
   NOM             ACC ACC
   The wine costs  him the whole salary

(Mostly some younger people don't seem to care too much about double
accusatives and mark the experiencer with dative case.  Brrr.  These
people typically also don't care about genitive objects, btw.)

**Henrik

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