Re: Help: Zhyler ECM/Raising Verbs (Longish)

Wow! Thanks for all the responses! I think I've come up with an answer (and this'll
work for pretty much all control/raising verbs), and it was suggested to me by
all the e-mails that people've sent. Thanks a lot!

In order...

Henrik wrote:

<<Hmm, this reminds me of Japanese which, according to a book I have,
 prohibits expression of inner states of other people.>>

I was hoping someone would bring up Japanese and/or Turkish, since they're both
robustly head-final, like Zhyler. This is kind of like what I end up doing,
except that when the subject of the wanting is the same as the subject of the
embedded clause, it's done with a single VP:

food-ACC. eat-VOL.-1sg. = "I want to eat the food"

The same would hold true for any other subject.

Still Henrik:

<<This then means 'I enable you to eat.' (it ambiguously also means 'I
 enable that you eat food.', but this would not be the preferred
 reading.)>>

A number of people pointed this out, but in Zhyler, causation is handled with
the causative suffix, to the extent that there are very few base verbs that
have a causative interpretation (e.g., the two verbs for "to kill" are derived
from the verbs "to die" and "to be dead" [each has a slightly different
meaning]). So with "to be able to", you get the following:

eat-CAUS.-ABIL.-1sg. "I can cause to eat"
eat-ABIL.-CAUS.-1sg. "I cause x to be able to eat"

Andreas wrote:

<< This is one of the ways to say it in Tairezazh: Ta zrón shu sha raig e'
 zaves "I want that you eat the bread". There's no overt accusative marker on
 the sentence _sha raig e' zaves_ "you eat the bread".>>

This is the comment that got my wheels spinning on my eventual answer.

Still Andreas:

<< I might be missing something, but couldn't you simply say "man-POS food-POS
 eating-GEN-GEN", treating the entire "food-POS eating-GEN" phrase as they 'y'
 of your schema above?>>

Though I have come up with an answer, there doesn't need to be only *one* answer.
After all, there are tons of ways to say a particular thing in any given
language. So, as soon as I can grok this (and right now I can't: I need to sit
down with it and right it down on paper to get exactly what the meaning of this
would be), this might be a viable second option (or first--I'll have to decide
which would be statistically more frequent once I've got them both set).

t. wrote:

<<I have an entirely separate class of verbs for this, that is: verbs that
 can take another sentence/clause as an argument.>>

This is what I wanted to avoid. In English, you can make just about any verb do
this, if it has something to do with intent or emotion, or whatever. In Zhyler,
I wanted there to be no variety on this (the variety comes elsewhere). So
creating verbs isn't an option.

Still t.:

<<Why not like in a Turkish relative clause? I want food-eating-you.

     The man that plows my fields -> The my-fields-plowing-man

 I want something like this for relative clauses in Taruven but aren't
 quite there yet...>>

I explored the relative clause option, and decided I didn't like it. Doesn't
mean it wouldn't work; I just didn't want to go in that direction.

Trebor wrote:

<<For "I want you to eat the food", you could say "I-NOM see-VOL eat you-ACC
 the food-DAT".>>

Referencing a later e-mail, a language like this would most likely mark "you" as dative
and "food" as accusative.

Philippe wrote:

<<I you translate: “He wants to eat the cake” by “He is
 cake-eating-VOL” (volitive), it means that “he” is
 “wanting”, so: “He is cake-eating-wanting”, or “He is
 ((cake-eating)-wanting). The same subject applies to
 “eat” and to “want”.>>

I read this whole e-mail, and let me tell you, this is a cool way of doing it.
With the nature of Zhyler, though, and the fact that I'm using the dummy verb
"to see", it wouldn't make sense to do it this way in Zhyler (it'd be adding an
extra level of stuff which wouldn't be necessary), but this is a cool idea. I
may borrow it for an isolating language I'm working on. ;)

Remi wrote:

<<kajø-xaçø : pjü've-juvlo tos'rja.
 (my emotional)-will : (material object taken in)'this-food
 (indicative unreal future)'thou.
 = My will: You will absorb this food.

 (I can't translate the unreal aspect in English but it's logical that what
 one wants another one to do isn't real... until it's done.)>>

First, let me say, ha! That's a funny translation. I think I'm going to start
expressing my desires that way. "My will: You will allow it to me that I should
absorb the last piece of pizza!" Hee, hee... I can understand how if you
translated it "the normal way" you wouldn't get the sense of it, though.

Anyway, what you wrote in the parentheses is what gave me the rest of my idea, so here it is:

In order to express desire of x for y to act z, you do the following:

(1) X is the subject of the verb "to see" which has a volitive suffix. So,
/eat-VOL.-1sg./. This verb is placed sentence-finally.

(2) The action is expressed normally. So, if it's "you eat food", it's /food-ACC.
eat-2sg./, with the sole exception that the verb is always in the irrealis. So:
/food-ACC. eat-IRR.-2sg./.

(3) Last, the *entire* VP is nominalized by adding a class XIV nominal suffix to
the end of the verb. So what you have is a verb that means something like, "for
you to eat the food". (I was having problems with this because I didn't know
how a noun should mark its verb-like arguments. In this case, though, the
argument structure is set, and the nominal suffix is a clitic attached at the
phrasal level, so there's no need to worry about it.)

(4) Finally, the VP in (3), being the direct object of the verb in (1), is marked
with the accusative case.

So, to say, "I want you to eat the food", you say:

uspan-ar us-wM-l-an-ar mat-po-m
/food-ACC. eat-IRR.-2sg.-xiv-ACC. see-VOL.-1sg./

And there you have it. Words like "intend", etc., are all taken care of by
suffixes, and to express, for example, "I hate for you to do that", you add
negative and pejorative suffixes to a verb with the volitive. Yay!

Gary wrote:

<<What about things like "I wish you wnated to do x as
 much as I want to.">>

"Want", of course, wouldn't work the same way, since it's not a verb in its own right,
but this'll be a good test case. I'll work on it.

Trebor wrote:

<< *sighs* Not another auxlanger... ;)) Why do many Europeans think that the
 passive voice is really necessary?>>

Come on, man, there's no place for this--especially when you're not on solid ground
with your arguments. Besides, you made some crucial assumptions that you didn't
stipulate. Specifically, you wrote:

<<I don't quite see your point. "DAT" stands for "dative case", as you know.
 It marks the indirect object of a sentence, and has nothing to do with
 giving.>>

Not true. Not, not, not, not, not, not true. The dative case marks the indirect
object in *some* languages, and even in those languages, the dative usually
does something else. To assume that every instance of the dative case in every
language instantiates an indirect object and nothing else is, quite frankly,
very euro-centric, which is specifically what you wanted to avoid. Doug gave a
good example from Turkish:

<< Disci mektub-u mudur-e imzala-t-ti
 Dentist letter-DO director-IO sign-CAUSE-PAST
 The dentist made the director sign the letter.

 DO = direct object
 IO = indirect object>>

Here, "director" is marked with the dative or indirect objective case, and "letter"
is marked with the accusative, or direct objective case. But it doesn't mean
that "director" functions as the *semantic* indirect object, or even the
functional indirect object. What happened here is that the sentence above has,
in a sense, another sentence within it:

Mudur mektub-u imzala-ti
 Director-NOM. letter-ACC. sign-PAST
 The director signed the letter.

In this case, the director is in the nominative. The directors function, in both
this sentence and in the above sentence, is identical: He's signing the letter.
He's the agent of the signing, and the letter is the patient. In the causative
sentence, though, "director" is marked with the dative case because it
indicates that there's a grammatical demotion. This is just like the passive,
where the subject is demoted to an oblique. Now, if cases themselves were at
the bottom of everything, then every language would mark every role with the
same case. That, however, is not the (excuse the pun) case. Off the top of my
head, I can think of languages that mark a demoted subject in a passive with:
(a) the instrumental, (b) the oblique, (c) the objective, (d) the authorative,
and (e) the modalis (if I'm remembering the term right).

Now, in one thing, you were right: The dative case is just a case. However,
"dative" does not always have to mean indirect object. There are no right and
wrong ways to use case marking. There are unpredictable ways, based on the rest
of the language (e.g., your example, where "cake" was in the dative), but it's
something that's entirely language-internal, and in no way is objective.
Semantic roles are the things that can be objective. (Though even that, I'm
sure, is not beyond debate.)

And. wrote:

<<"want" looks to be control/equi, not raising.>>

D'oh! Of course, you're right. It's rather embarrassing, though, after two quarters
of syntax. My professor stipulated, several times, that if there was *one*
thing we should take away from the class, one thing we should be able to do, it
should be:

(a) To know the four different types of raising/control verbs.
(b) To give English examples of each of the four.
(c) To run tests on each to show how they're different.

Obviously, I failed. :( I hope the Jon Moore that was in the relay isn't the John Moore
who was my syntax professor...

Again, thanks everyone for the help!  You're awesome!

-David

Reply