Re: Humbly beg a critique of a role-marking system for my language.

Steven Williams wrote:
>The experiencer, however, is something a bit stranger
>than both. In meaning, it comes close to the German
>tendency to use dative objects to express things like
>'I'm cold' ('mir ist kalt'); the experiencer can be
>either the doer of an action without a patient ('she
>is going on a walk') or the experiencer of some state
>('he is cold').
>
>/a-nu tsaia-s'a/
>'he/she has twitched' (he or she just twitched,
>nothing more to it and any speculation on the matter
>is irrelevant)
>
>The actual usage varies quite a bit. One experiencing
>a state can be marked as an actor, implying that the
>state was his or her own doing ('he is cold [because
>he forgot to pack his coat]').
________________________
Case grammar as defined by Fillmore, Anderson, etc. does not usually allow
for the EXPERIENCER role to function as the "doer of an action without a
patient" as in 'she is going on a walk.'  A volitionally chosen act under
the conscious control of the "doer" correlates with the PATIENT role so
that it can describe the same semantic relation when an Agent exists as
in 'I made her go on a walk.'  (Ithkuil distinguishes such self-motivating
patients via the Inducive case to distinguish them from Absolutive case-
marked patients acting under the influence of an external agent).

Those languages which overtly mark an EXPERIENCER role use it only to mark
nouns undergoing an unwilled act or state, whether proprioceptive or
autonomic in origin (as in emotional reactions, coughing, sneezing, feeling
hot or cold, idiopathic pain, etc.).  This is the realm, for example, of
the Affective case in certain Northeast Caucasian (Dagestanian) languages,
which corresponds directly, I believe, to Fillmore's EXPERIENCER role.

--John Quijada

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