Re: Q's abuot trigger again

From: "Javier BF" <uaxuctum@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2003 9:41 PM
Subject: Re: Q's abuot trigger 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!)
>
> Are you joking or didn't you notice my extensive
> explanation with plenty of examples showing the
> clear conceptual difference between verbal focus
> and word emphasis?
No, I'm not. I just haven't read yet the whole Triggeriness... thread,
becuase I haven't had so much time - many class tests to learn for during
the last weeks, you know!

> >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 an agent or patient trigger be illogical?
> Those are the usual triggers in English (the
> agent is the "trigger" of active sentences and
> the patient is the "trigger" of passive sentences).
But then you would get something meaning the location is doing something, or
hasn't that agent/patient stuff to do with who acts? So at least (to correct
myself), as far as I've understood it up to now, an object which is
definitely considered to be a *thing* cannot act and thus cannot be the
agent. As I said, that's just how I've understood it up to now.

> >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.
>
> "He" there is not an agent, it's an experiencer,
> and there's no patient because the verbal event
> isn't transitive (neither grammatically nor
> semantically - the transitive verbal notions
> described in "He sleeps his headache off" and
> "Our tent sleeps four" are both different from
> the one described in "He sleeps in his bed").
>
> While "in his bed" is not an object, neither
> locative (like "the garden" in "She planted the
> garden with flowers") nor non-locative (like "the
> flowers" in "She planted the flowers"), but merely
> an inessive non-core argument (you can take it away
> and the result is still a complete and grammatical
> sentence: "He sleeps").
That means he is *experiencing* the sleep, he does not sleep himself. Of
course, "in his bed" is inessive, but it's also a place, and that's why it
can be locative as well, right?

> >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).
>
> Virtually, you can have as many cases as you
> like (or can think of). And it would still be
> "senseful" to have as much as some two dozens
> or so of cases like in some natural languages.
>
> Then, as I understand it, "arguments" are the
> "slots" dependent on a verb, while "cases"
> are the inflections (bound or unbound) that
> nominal phases carry to show their relationship
> to other nominal phrases or to the verb.
>
> E.g. in French, the verb "boire" has valency=2,
> which means it governs two necessary arguments
> ("slots"): that of the subject and that of the
> object (other arguments expressing things such
> as location are merely optional). Thus, you can
> have a sentence like "Je bois la lait (en la
> chambre)", where "je" fills the slot of "subject",
> "la lait" fills the slot of "object" and "en
> la chambre" can be added as non-core argument
> introducing an additional slot for "location".
> Then, the (default) active voice of the verb
> tells us that, semantically, the subject is agent
> and the object is patient. If one then turns
> the voice to passive, the verb loses one valency,
> thus becoming grammatically intransitive (valency=1)
> and governing now only one necessary slot, that
> of the subject which is now semantically patient,
> being the semantical agent demoted to a merely
> optional argument introduced by the agentive
> (or 'ergative') preposition "par": "La lait
> est bu (par me) (en la chambre)"
>
> In French, the slot of subject must be filled
> with a nominative case, thus "je" and not "me".
> But the slot of object may be filled either
> with an accusative case, "la lait" -> "la":
> "Je bois la lait" -> "Je la bois", or with a
> partitive case, "de la lait" -> "en": "Je bois
> de la lait" -> "J'en bois", being this choice
> of case determined by the countability of the
> object and the associated telicity of the verb.
>
>
> >*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*.
>
> The 'ablative' means "from" (which is what
> the Latin preposition "ab" means), while the
> 'adlative' or 'allative' means "to" (which
> is what the Latin preposition "ad" means).
> It can be confusing that they look so similar.
>
> Cheers,
> Javier
OK - I understood the rest! Thanks for so much explanation! And as for that
Triggeriness... thread, I'll read it when I've got more time - next week's
Friday we'll get Christmas holidays until 11 January 2004. Three weeks
should really be enough to read that thread.

Carsten

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