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Re: Inverse marking (was: Kijeb text uploaded)

From:Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
Date:Saturday, April 22, 2006, 3:30
On 4/21/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:

> >[snip] > >AFA I understand from Blake's book this is typical of > >Algonquinian languages. The question is if it is *so* > >typically Algonquinian that it is unrealistic in a > >non-Algonquinian language? > > I believe there are Meso-American and South-American languages, thousands > of miles away from Canada, that have these systems, too. >
Yup. (see below)
> >BTW would it be unrealistic for the direct voice to > >be unmarked? > > Not at all; IMO that woud be _realistic_. The Direct Voice expresses the > expected situation (the more animate participant is the Agent, the less > animate participant is the Patient); the Inverse Voice expresses the > _unexpected_ situation, so it should be "marked". > >
Indeed. It would definitely be unusual for the indirect voice to be the unmarked one. I'd shy away from saying it would be *impossible*, but an unmarked indirect wouldn't be something I'd expect to find.
> > >I envisage Kijeb as something of a mixture, with both > >Hierarchical word order and verb marking, as well as nom/acc > >marking for animates, as well as Split-S/Fluid-S, and the > >daughter languages (perhaps not all of them) developing > >split ergative marking. Perhaps it is altogether > >unrealistic, or at least highly redundant, to have it all in > >the same bag! >
Inverse/Hierarchical and Split/Fluid-S, at least, are perfectly compatible. Spike Gildea (1998) reconstructs an Inverse/Split-S system for the Cariban family, similar IIRC to the one that survives in Hixkaryana. (For those looking for word-order correlations, Hixkaryana is OVS regardless of direct/inverse. Not unusual for a Cariban language.) (Oh, and to be clear, what Gildea terms Inverse might be what others term Hierarchical.) The combination has always struck me as a priori pretty reasonable. You have a set of agent-marking affixes if the agent is the highest in the hierarchy, and a set of patient-marking affixes if the patient is highest. Intransitive verb? If it's an agent, use the agent affixes; if it's a patient, use the patient ones. I don't recall if any of Proto-Cariban's daughters evolved into a split ergative system, but I recall that some of them have ergative alignment. (I can't seem to find Gildea's book tonight.) I see no reason that it would be "unnatural" for an Inverse/Split-S agreement system to evolve into a split-ergative agreement system. Maybe it hasn't actually happened before, but it's not a crazy/out-there idea. -- Pat