Re: Standard Average European (was: case system)

On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:16:22 -0400, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:

>On Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:08:40 +1000, Tristan McLeay wrote:
>>
>> > On 11/04/08 22:48:34, J�rg Rhiemeier wrote:
>> > > As usual, Wikipedia is your friend:
>> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European
>> >
>> > Now: I thought I had a pretty good understanding of linguistic
>> > terminology and could understand most things you through at me, if
>> > necessary having to think a little first. And maybe I'm just tired
>> > right now, but most of the unillustrated items on the Wikipedia article
>> > are just gibberish to me. Could someone please explain them and their
>> > significance?
>>
>>(Jörg Rhiemeiier): Indeed, I don't understand all of them either,
>
>Nor I.
Fourthed.

I did manage to find online an earlier article of Haspelmath in which he
discussed the first nine of these, together with the two other features
  (9') conjunctions that go between the two conjoined things and bind more
closely to the second:  _A and-B_ versus _A-and B_ or _A-and B-and_ or _A
B-and_.
  (11') verb fronting in yes-no questions.
For those who can access this, it's at
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0388-0001(98)00004-7

>4.a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers;
>** Wha??
The paper I found only talks about a special case of this, namely the fact
that SAE langs prefer to encode experiencers as subject -- "I like it", as
opposed to "it pleases me".

(Kinda tangential: when Amanda was asking recently about Mirexu agreement, I
was actually fair thrown off by the choice of "we miss you" as the verb of
the first clause.  Kept wanting to interpret it as something other than a
simple transitive with 1pl experiencer=subj... and this from an English
native speaker...)

>6.a prominence of anticausatives in inchoative-causative pairs;
>**Wha??  Woudl this refer to the use of the reflexive pron. in e.g. 'la
>puerta se abrió' the door opened?
It refers to the fact that, in pairs of this form ("open (intr)" vs. "open
(tr)", "rise" vs. "raise", etc.), the SAE tendency is to make the
intransitive member the more basic of the two.

>7.dative external possessors;
>**Wha?? or does it mean like French c'est a moi 'it's mine' ?? I'm not sure
>Germanic or other Romance have anything like this.
Indeed this is the pattern in "Er brach mir das Bein".  In English we've got
the similar pattern in "he stabbed me _in_ the leg"; Haspelmath calls this a
locative external possessor and so takes English as peripheral with respect
to this feature.

>9.particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality;
>**does this mean like "plus, más" ?  Engl. and I think Germ. have both
>these (more/most, mehr) as well as -er/-est forms?? Romance langs. retain a
>few synthetic comparatives (mejor, mieux) and Span/Ital retain the Latin
>*-issimus superlative
Philip Newton and your twin in the other-side-of-the-coiniverse have it
right with "he is bigger *than* I".

Alex

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