Re: Mir ist kalt -- How to analyze this sentence?

In the last episode, (On Wednesday 04 Tamuz 5767 16:29:57), Paul Roser wrote:
> 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
(non-)finite = (ir-)realis? Is that your usage? It would seem to be odd to
conflate the usual meaning of "(not) expressing tense or aspect" with that
of "expressing reality or non-reality of action".

Jeff.

--
"Please understand that there are small
European principalities devoted to debating
Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."

                            -- Cameron Laird

Reply