Re: Accusative? The saga continues ...

From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
>
> Unless my brain has recently been reprogrammed by Mircosoft, Altaii
> maintains an absolute distinction between A and P (whereas S, as far as I
> can see, can be identified with either without creating any weirdities).
> Basic syntax of a transitive sentence is;
>
> A P (everything else) VERB
>
> whereas intransitive ones are;
>
> S (everything else) VERB
>
> While neither A nor P (nor S) get any case-endings, the syntax makes it
> unambiguous what's what.
Other than morphological (or word order) evidence, another criteria that can
be used to determine the "degree" of ergativity that a language exhibits is
syntactic ergativity, i.e are there accusative or ergative motivated
syntactic constraints on clause combination and on the omission of
coreferential constituents in clause combinations.  How does Altaii handle
the following:

(1) John [S] came and (he [A]) Mary [P].kissed.
(2) John [S] came and Mary [A] (him [P]) kissed.

In (1) the coreferential NPs are S and A-function arguments.  If Altaii
allows the omission of the latter it is syntactically accusative in that it
requires the coreferential NPs to be in Subject (A=S) relation.

In (2) the coreferential NPS are S and P-function arguments.  If Altaii
allows the ommision of the latter it is syntactically ergative in that it
requires the coreferential NPs to be in Pivot (S=P) relation.

Stay curious,
David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
www.graywizard.net
AIM: GraWzrd