Re: Q's abuot trigger again

Quoting Carsten Becker <post@...>:

> Hello everyone again!
>
> I have got some more questions:
>
> (It's clear now that every "unit" in a sentence, such as "on the desk", can
> take the trigger for indicating that it is focused in the sentence and thus
> kind of a subject and it's also clear that the verb cannot be e.g. an
> instrumental!)
Well, if I got Roger right, in Tagalog, only an agent, patient, benefactive or
a location can get promoted to triggerhood. No reason the set should be the
same in another lang, tho'.

> The instrumental (or benefit, or location or what so ever) can be trigger of
> course, but it would be quite illogical, if the what-so-ever was agent or
> patient, right? The sentence would make no sense.
???

Why would it make no sense to trigger an agent or patient? It's done in
Tagalog, according to the examples we've been presented.

> And what about sentences like "He sleeps in his bed"? "He" is the agent,
> sleeps the action, and "in his bed" so to say the locative object. But
> what's with the patient? I don't think it's marked anywhere.
As John said, if would be more usual to say "he" is a patient here.

(Notice that, with intransitives, English grammar cares squat about the
difference between agents and patients.)

> Is it senseful to have more "cases" (or arguments or how they're called)
> than instrumentive, benefactive, *ablative? (following Barry Garcia on
> which arguments Tagalog makes use of).
>
> *ablative: I'm not sure if this is the right term for that. Barry Garcia
> wrote, "[...] Direction - to whom the action was directed towards" - but
> AFAIK an ablative defines "indicating direction from or time when"
> (http://phrontistery.50megs.com/cases.html), it's *from*, not *to*.
A case for "to" would most typically be called an 'allative'. 'Ablative' would
indeed be expected to cover "from".

Well, the record number of cases is supposedly Hungarian's 24 or so.

The trick of all huge case inventories is that they've got alot of spatial
cases, corresponding to English spatial propositions. Beyond them, you can use
one or two possessive cases, a few corresponding to non-spatial prepositions
(eg "with"), and a few 'core' cases for assigning nouns to the argument slots
of the verb. I'm not aware of any language using more than three cases for
this (English has three, altho syntactically indicated).

                                                               Andreas