Re: Georgian Case (Was Re: Polysynthetic nouns)

From:    David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>
> Philippe wrote:
>
> <<That's very interesting. I read something like that
> before, but I didn't quite realize the implications.
> Do you mean for ex that for these two sentences:
> - I'm sneezing
> - I sneezed
> the ergative is used only for the secund case (there
> was a sneeze from/to me ? Or is it a bad example ?
> Maybe the 1st person behaves another way ? Do you have
> a better example ?>>
>
> No, not quite.   The ergative/narrative case marks the subject
> of a *transitive* verb in the...uh....series 2 screeve (I'll
> explain in a minute). Here's an example:
Actually, no.  There are two classes of intransitives.  In one
conjugation (the second), the single argument always takes the
nominative case (which differs from the first conjugation patients
only in the present series).  In the other, the third, the single
argument patterns like the agent of first conjugation transitives
in all series.  Georgian is, it must be emphatically repeated,
not an ergative language at all, but a Split-S language (if that).

> (1)
> k'ats-i   roman-s ts'er-s
> /man-NOM. novel-ACC. write-3obj./
> "He writes/is writing a novel"
More accurately:  "The/A man is writing a novel."  "He is writing
a novel" would  be "Is romans c'ers", with no pro-drop.  Because
Georgian is a so-called pro-drop language, usually you just say
"Romans ce'rs".

>(a third person subject is indicated by  null marking in this screeve)
It's actually not marked by any morpheme at all, null or otherwise.
(I can give you a reference by Comrie if you wish.)

> (2)
> k'ats-ma roman-i da-ts'er-a
> /man-ERG. novel-NOM. preverb-write-3rdobj./
> "He wrote a novel."
>
> As you can see, the nominative case doubles as the absolutive case in
> the past tense.
There is no absolutive case in modern Georgian.  In Old Georgian,
the c'rpelobiti case, which is usually translated as absolutive,
functioned as the predicate of the copula "ars" (mod. Geo. "aris").
But this is not an absolutive case as the term is usually used.

> This is exactly what you'd expect from a split-ergative
> system where the split is based on tense.
[...]

> Once you've got that set, you need to find out how many specified
> arguments the verb has.   If a verb has an indirect object present, it
> will agree with the indirect object.
An overgeneralization.  In the perfect series, ditransitive first
conjugation verbs that take goal arguments in the present and aorist
series (I'm consciously avoiding mentioning grammatical relations here),
will demote their goal arguments from the dative to a postpositional
phrase in -tvis "for".

> Next, you have to deal wtih nouns.   The series I screeves are simple,
> because nominals get case-marked in a traditional nominative/accusative
> pattern.  In other words, the subject gets the nominative, the direct
> object the accusative, and the indirect object the dative.
> (Oh, remember: The dative and accusative are identical.)
So, you're suggesting that the accusative case is entirely covert?
I don't know of any actual Kartvelologists who suggest that Georgian
has an accusative case at any level. It's simply not a nominative-
accusative language, nor an ergative one.

> The aorist is used as the completed past tense.   Why's it called the
> aorist then?   I don't know.
It's the simple past tense form of the verb made without reference
to aspect.  (Aspect is marked separately, usually by a preverb.)

> First, one of the things about this particular class I verb in the
> aorist is that it takes the preverb "da-".   The preverb is meaningless:
> It just appears in certain screeves.
It's actually not meaningless:  there are whole series of verbs
where it quite concretely means "down".  Here, the preverb perfectivizes
the verb as between "to write" and "to write down".  With some verbs,
you are correct in saying the preverb adds little or no meaning, but
they are the exception rather than the rule.

> It's not an aorist tense marker, because it appears in lots of other
> screeves.   Basically, if you look at the whole Georgian verbal paradigm,
> what's striking is that the same exponence, or phonological forms, are
> used over and over again over all the tenses. The important thing, though,
> is that each screeve is distinct from each other screeve. So it doesn't
> matter that "da-" doesn't mean anything or mark anything. All it does is
> make one tense different from the next (combined with other markers).
Preverbs, it bears repeating, mark verbal aspect.  They are derivational,
not inflectional.  Both c'era "he wrote it" and "dac'era" "he wrote it
down" are extant.  And most of the time they are quite concrete.

> Next, we need agreement morphology.   The given example above has a direct
> object that's present and a subject that's present.   The third person
> direct object (in this series) is marked with an /-a/ suffix. The third
> person subject is not marked, so that's all the agreement morphology you
> get, and you get /dats'era/.
Abstracting away from the problem of whether Georgian has relations
like subject or object at all, the -a aorist suffix marks the AGENT,
not the patient.  You can tell this because it also agrees with the
agent in number.

> Next, we have to figure out how the nominals get case-marked.   A
> peculiarity of the second series is that it's marked in an ergative/
> absolutive way.   So the indirect object is still marked with the dative,
> but the subject is marked with the ergative/narrative, and the direct
> object is marked with the nominative.
Just call it "ergative";  "narrative" case is nonstandard among anglophone
Kartvelologists.

> Anyway, it's a really neat system, and I think a good argument for Word
> and Paradigm Morphology, as opposed to whatever Chomsky's doing right
> now.   (I forget the name. It starts with a "d".)
"Distributed Morphology".  And you're right IMHO:  that particular
theory is horrible.  Because syntax is hierarchically ranked over
"phonological form" and "logical form", and those two part ways,
there's no way to form a Sausseurian sign!

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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