Re: Non-accusative, non-ergative, non-active

Joe wrote:
> >
> > Although I heard somewhere that this is rare in natlangs, there's no
> reason
> > why you couldn't mark the "S" "A" and "O" arguments each in their own
> > distinct way, producing a non-accusative, non-ergative core grammar.
> >
> > Still another kind of marking:   semantic marking  (as opposed to
> syntactic
> > marking)
> >
> > IIRC, nominative/accusative & ergative/absolutive schemes fall under the
> > "syntactic" marking category, in which arguments are marked according to
> the
> > verb's syntactic properties, regardless of the semantic relationships
> > between the verb and its arguments.
> >
> > For instance, in English, we can say "The man opened the box" and "The
> door
> > opened," placing both the word for "man" and the word for "door" in
first
> > position (the same syntactic marking) even though "man" is the agent and
> > "door" is the patient (different semantic roles).  Why?   Because,
> > syntactically, "open" is an active verb in both sentences.  To look at
it
> > semantically, it *prototypically* stands for an action peformed by an
> agent.
> >
> > In a version of English with direct marking, "the man" and "the door"
> would
> > be marked differently, something like this:
> >
> > "The man-agent opened the box-patient."    "The door-patient opened."
> >
> > The marking on the arguments reflects the semantic relationships that
the
> > arguments have with the verb as it is used in a given sentence, not
> > according to the verb's prototypical meaning.
> >
This might be a good time to re-mention (after several years) Wallace
Chafe's book "Meaning and the Structure of Language" publ. back in the 70s,
sort of an off-shoot of Fillmore's "Case Grammar".  Neither of these very
interesting approaches ever really caught on, though Fillmore led to some
important revisions of Transformational Grammar a la Chomsky.......It
certainly influenced my conlanging (and view of language in general) and
IIRC David Bell's Amman Iar.

Typical example:  the "verb" _full_:
Stative:  The tank is full.  O V
Inchoative (become...):  The tank is filling/ The tank filled. O inch-V
Causative (actually caus.+Inch., agent subj.) John filled the tank. A V O
Causative (instrumental subj.) The water filled the tank. I V O

According to Fillmore's system, "full" allows the following arguments:
Obligatory: patient (or call it object) O
Optional:  agent A, instrument I
The underlying specification of Engl. "full" is--
FULL [O (A) (I)]
Any of these can be used as "subject"

It's language-specific whether a given language marks the subject in some
way (case endings, word order), or marks the verb (by a derivational
morpheme, or lexically, or not at all). Or paraphrase (is open vs.
trans/intr. open). Or some combination of the two.

Consider Spanish--
El vaso está lleno 'the glass is full'
El vaso se llenó 'the glass filled'
Juan llenó el vaso 'John filled the glass'

English tends to use word order, with occasional changes to the verb
(lexical--die-kill-- or old derivations in some cases like fill-full,
hot-heat).  But OE, Latin et al. marked "subject" with the nominative case.

Kash uses verbal derivatives--
Base/stative: tuwi yafasan 'the soup is hot'
soup 3s-hot
(cf. tuwi fasan 'hot soup')

Inchoative: tuwi ya-çu-fasan (3s-inch.-hot_
'the soup is heating, getting hot'

Causative: indemi  ya-rum-fasan tuwi (3s-caus-hot >yarupasan) 'My mother is
heating the soup"

The Kash system is probably a lot more consistent that what is seen in any
natlang, AFAIK.  I've never been sure whether causative verbs can have
non-human Instrument subjects-- ?*huça yarupasan tuwi ?'the fire heated the
soup'