Re: Ant: Re: Most challenging features of languages?

Hello!

On 6/23/05, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Elliott Lash <erelion12@...> writes:
> > > >Oh, dear God, I _still_ haven't figured out what
> > > >construction to use in what case! 'Je n'ai pas de
> > > >fromage' or 'je n'ai pas du fromage'? Frustrating!
> > > >
> > >
> > > It's strange that I never noticed that, "J'ai DU
> > > fromage" but "Je n'ai pas
> > > DE fromage", "J'ai DE LA soupe" but "JE n'ai pas DE
> > > soupe"
> > >
> >  for me, I've always rationalized it by saying that
> > the negative is much less defined than the positive
> > version of the sentence, hence the object is
> > unaccompanied by the definite article. Similar things
> > happen in Russian (where for some verbs, the object
> > becomes genitive in the negative, whereas in the
> > positive the object is in the accusative [except for
> > animate nouns, which are always genitive when they're
> > an object]). Also, in Finnish, the partitive instead
> > of ...whatever objective case they have, is used in
> > the negative.
Your rationalization is pretty close to what our French teacher told
us -- of course she didn't use all those technical terms (or
references to Russian or Finnish, for that matter), because you can't
do that to a bunch of eleven-year-olds; but it essentially boiled down
to the negative needing that extra _de_ because it is much less
defined than the positive.

And once I had understood the principle behind constructions like "je
mange de la viande" or "il n'y a pas de fromage ici", I had a much
easier time understanding the negative-plus-genitive in Russian (some
years later) and the partitive case in Finnish (even more years
later). :-)

> For me, that was also no problem -- I internalised 'pas de' quite
> quickly (and I understood it in a similar way: why bother about
> definedness when there's *nothing*).
Heh -- that's a nice way of putting it. ;-)

(I didn't have too much trouble with that partitive, or
genitive-partitive, construction; but it took me considerably longer
to wrap my mind around verbal aspect, both in French and in Russian.
It was easier in Russian than in French, not just because it wasn't
the first time I'd seen verbal aspect, but also because the Russian
teacher explained aspect as aspect (with the number of technical terms
reduced to a level that non-linguists could handle), whereas the
French teacher somehow managed to "explain" the entire concept without
actually saying anything aspect-related at all. No wonder I didn't
understand why I should sometimes say _j'ai mangé_ and sometimes _je
mangeai_. The English teacher, on the other hand, never used any
aspect-related terminology, but did give us clear rules on when to use
the past tense and when to use the present perfect, so I put two and
two together and realized that I might just as well "recycle" the
technical terms I'd learned in Russian class.)

[snip French subjonctif]

> Note that in Finnish, the partitive is also used in positive sentences
> when the action has imperfective aspect.  So 'I am building a house'
> and 'I build houses' have 'house(s)' in partitive, but 'I have built a
> house.' uses accusative (since the house is referred to as a whole).
> So this is more what I link to the usage of 'de' in general in French,
> not to the article ('je veux *du* the': I don't want all the the there
> is, but only part of it, so partitive / de).
A friend of mine brought back an interesting anecdote from a general
linguistics class, where the professor, who was apparently not
familiar with Finnish, had claimed that in all languages, verbs
contain aspect information on some level (or something like that). My
friend pointed out that in Finnish, aspect is encoded on the object,
if anywhere: _söin omenan_ (accsg) "I ate an apple" (the whole of it),
_söin omenat_ (accpl) "I ate the apples" (specific apples, e.g. "the
apples you bought yesterday", and I ate all of them completely); but
_söin omenaa_ (partsg) "I ate some apple/apples" (could be an
unspecified/unimportant number of apples, for example, or just part of
an apple, or a number of apple slices or wedges without any way of
determining the number of actual apples involved). _Söin_ "I ate"
always has the same form here, but the sentences seem to contain some
sort of aspect information, which therefore must be encoded in some
place outside the verb. Which only leaves the noun. Right? ;-)

Similarly, when dealing with books instead of apples: _luin kirjan_
(accsg) means "I read the book" (in its entirety, probably even in the
right order), but _luin kirjaa_ (partsg) means either "I read some
part of the book" or "I browsed the book". (My Russian is quite rusty,
but I'm pretty sure that these two sentences would be _ya prochitala
knigu_ resp. _ya chitala knigu_, i.e. "I read.PERF book.ACC" resp. "I
read.IMPERF book.ACC". Voilà, aspect.)

Another friend, a native speaker of Finnish and a computer geek,
explained to me once that when you talk about reading Usenet news, you
can't use the accusative case when referring to entire newsgroups; the
accusative would imply that you've read the whole of the thing, but
since people keep posting new articles, that would be impossible, so
the partitive is your only option. I assume similar rules apply to
reading mailing lists, watching (infamously endless) telenovelas, and
so on.

Now I'm not sure if I feel comfortable claiming that Finnish shows
aspect marking in nouns; but at the very least, it's probably a nice
mnemonic trick for speakers of an aspect language who want to learn a
language that has such partitive constructions, or vice versa.


Then again, there are those pesky verbs that *always* take a certain
case regardless of "completeness" or "specifiedness" or
"perfectiveness" considerations:

> But then, 'Rakastan sinua' has 'sinä' = 'you' in partitive, too.
> It means 'I love you.'  Part of you only?  Hopefully not. :-)
>
> I think the use of partitive is lexicalised in Finnish, which makes it
> less logical...
Yes, less logical, but not less predictable. It just means that
in addition to remembering what kind of concept/connotation/...
triggers a certain case, one also has to remember that the object of a
certain verb *always* takes a certain case, never mind semantics. ;-)

(This realization usually hits you right after you think that you've
*finally* worked out the logic behind the intricacies of Finnish
grammar.)

This kind of thing is very confusing to learners when they're advanced
enough to start playing with passive constructions... Most people
(well, those of us who speak at least one SAE language ;) expect that
the passive of "I(subj) love you(obj)" (with appropriate case markers)
would be something like "you(subj) are loved" (again, with an
appropriate case marker). But what you get in Finnish is closer to
"you(obj) are loved" (or "undefined(subj) loves you(obj)" according to
some) than to "you(subj) are loved": _sinua_ has the same form in
_(minä) rakastan sinua_ "I love you" as in _sinua rakastetaan_ "you
are loved".

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)