Re: Mir ist kalt -- How to analyze this sentence?
| From: | Paul Roser <pkroser@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, June 20, 2007, 15:29 |
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On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:39:54 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>Quoting Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> The topic already says it all. How do I analyze the sentence
>> "Mir ist kalt"? That's German for "I feel cold", and breaks
>> down into 1sg.DAT is cold. But what is the subject in this
>> sentence? "Kalt", despite it's an adjective?
>
>Some grammars will tell you that _mir_ is a "dative subject" here. I don't like
>this analysis, among other reasons because there is no obvious reason verbal
>agreement should change just because a subject is put in an odd case form -
>one'd expect **_Mir bin kalt_.
The so-called dative-subject is actually fairly widespread, occuring in not
only German, Icelandic and Russian, but also Marathi, Hindi/Urdu and IIRC
some Northeast Caucasian languages as well, one of it's most common uses
being to mark a non-volitional experiencer.
One of the articles I found proposed the theory that it was a feature of
Indo-European (or perhaps Proto-IE) that finite (ie realis) verbs had a
nominative subject and non-finite (irrealis) verbs had a dative subject.
However, since I don't know that much about (P)IE, I can't comment on
whether that's feasible or not.
-Pfal
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