Re: Trigger language?
| From: | vaksje <vaksje@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Friday, January 24, 2003, 22:24 |
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At 11:23 PM 1/23/2003 +0100, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>En réponse à vaksje <vaksje@...>:
>
> >
> > Perhaps I was thinking of agent and patient instead.
>
>Those are semantic roles, and as such exist in any language :) .
Aha! *makes note not to forgot to actively distinguish between semantic and
syntactic roles*
> Aren't subject
> > and
> > object just a way to make these clear?
>
>Nope, they are just a way to make the whole thing confusing! :)) Subject and
>object are entities defined and working properly only with nominative-
>accusative languages, i.e. the majority of European languages. They don't work
>anywhere else that well (even in a nominative accusative language like
>Japanese, they don't work that well. Look at a sentence like "watashi wa anata
>ga suki da", meaning "I like you". Well, what is translated as a subject is
>actually a topic - particle "wa" - while what is translated as an object is
>actually a subject in the original sentence!!! - particle "ga" -). And they
>don't always mark agent and patient. In the sentence "I'm given the book", the
>object is indeed the patient but the subject is no agent at all!!! And a
>sentence like "I see her" contains neither an agent nor a patient, but an
>experiencer and an experiencee.
Luckily I can understand that Japanese sentence (thank my anime obsession
;)). Apparently I thought applying the terms subject/object to any language
would be okay. In the case of Japanese (being nom-acc of course) and to
prove my idiotic urge, I'll do so based on the English translation: watashi
wa (subject) & anata ga (object).
> How are they marked in trigger
> > (isn't this simply marking the topic's function on the verb?)
>
>Yep, but that's all there is. The topic function is a semantic
>feature. "Subject" and "object" are syntactic ones, not to be confused.
>My
>Itakian doesn't have subjects (it only has triggers)
Can't a trigger be marked for a subject too (in another language of
course)? Or what do you mean exactly by "it *only* has triggers"?
>Subject and object are then useful to explain people knowing only accusative
>languages how an ergative language works, but that's where their use
>stops. For
>anything else, an analysis directly using the syntactic cases, the semantic
>roles or the division into topic and comment are the best things to do.
Affirmative. :) When I thought of subject/object, I only imagined a way of
assigning them based on a sentence's translation. I reckoned it was okay to
first analyze a phrase, transform it into an I.E. accusative model and then
assign subject or object. Thus the syntactic case would have a different
function in different phrases when transformed. Anyhow, a direct analysis
seems much better. :))
> >
> > I see. :)
> >
>
>Well, let me define topic and comment: the topic is "what we are talking
>about"
>(and thus can be omitted, but is always present at least in context) and the
>comment is "what we're saying about the topic" (and is thus mandatory in a
>sentence because it's always the reason why we are uttering this sentence, to
>comment on something ;)) ). Any utterance is analysable into topics and
>comments, and as such are universal (what's interesting is to see how
>languages
>treat those, grammatically like in Japanese with the topic marker "wa", or
>contextually like European languages, which resort to optional or indirect
>things like reordering the sentence, using passive voice, or a construction
>like "as for").
Thanks for this useful clarification! :)
vaksje.
http://starfish.mine.nu:8080/~vaxje/
(unfortunately does not yet contain conlang stuff ;)
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