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?


>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).


>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").


>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

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