Re: Q's abuot trigger again

Quoting Carsten Becker <post@...>:

> > >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,
No. It would mean that the location is treated much like how English treats
them; as an adverbial.

> or
> hasn't that agent/patient stuff to do with who acts?
That's correct. But how would that transmogrif an location into an actor just
because an agent or passive is triggered? I'd be more worried if the location
was triggered, since that turns it into a subject (sort of), and agents are
often thought of as the prototypical subjects.

> 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.
I don't know if Tagalog allows inanimate things to be agents, but English
allows them to be transitive subjects, which is as close to "agent" you get as
a grammatical category in English.

> > >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.
No. As you've seen, there's a few options how to analyze this sentence -
Javier calling "he" an experiencer, John a "patient" - but there's certainly
no analyzing suggesting the "he" isn't the one sleeping!

(Again, English cares nothing at all about the differences between agents,
patients or indeed experiencers in the case of intransitives; they all get
summarily clumped as nominative arguments.)

> Of
> course, "in his bed" is inessive, but it's also a place, and that's why it
> can be locative as well, right?
I'm unfamiliar with this particular piece of terminology, but as far as I
understand it, Javier's using "locative" for mandatory and "inessive" for
optional specifications of place.

                                                        Andreas