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Re: Inverse marking (was: Kijeb text uploaded)

From:Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
Date:Saturday, April 22, 2006, 17:47
On Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:37:34 +0300, John Vertical
<johnvertical@...> wrote:

>(...) >>However, Split-S systems and Split-Ergative systems are not the same as >>Hierarchical systems, even though the "hierarchy" is intimately involved >>in deciding exactly where the "split" in the Split-Ergative system will >>be. >(...) > >I'm late in on the topic, but ... isn't "hierarchical alignment" a rather >different beast from nom/acc, erg/abs, split-S etc. alignment schemes
Yes.
>in that the latter are "primarily" about the case-marking of nouns, and the >former "primarily" about word order?
No. "Nom/acc, erg/abs, split-S etc." are about agreement and word-order as well as about case-marking. Also they are about pronouns and nominal-like phrases derived from nominalizations of other parts-of-speech or of phrases or clauses, as well as about nouns. "Hierarchical alignment" is about all the same things; except that case- marking is not used in hierarchical-alignment systems. All of the other techniques, including both word-order and agreement, are. In particular it would be tough to call a system a "hierarchical alignment" system if it had no agreement marking; although apparently some linguists are willing to do so, when they do, they wind up including Modern Greek and Biblical Hebrew, for instance, among "inverse" systems.
>So if verb agreement isn't important, a >language could easily have both "hierarchical" and "case" alignment, no?
Well, I'm not sure I know how to answer, since verb-agreement _is_ important; but I'll try anyway. In an inverse-voice system, the transitive verb is marked in the inverse voice whenever the more agent-likely participant is actually the patient and the less agent-likely participant is actually the agent. As I understand it, in some Tanoan and/or Apachean and/or Navajo and/or Aztecan language(s?), this voice-marking of the verb ("yi-" or "bi-") occurs, but no other "agreement" marking on the verb takes place. In many hierarchical-alignment systems, including the Algonquian, the verb agrees in person with a single participant; this participant is always whichever participant is highest on the agent-likelihood hierarchy, regardless of whether or not it is actually the agent. (There may be problems with this description when one of the participants is first person and the other participant is second person.) Clearly some means must be used to tell which participant actually is the agent in such clauses. Marking the verb with either the direct voice or the inverse voice, would be one means of doing so; but another means of doing so would be case-marking the participants themselves. So you could conceivably have a language whose head-marking was a Hierarchical Alignment System of agreement, but whose dependent-marking was some case system -- either accusative or ergative or split-ergative. The whole question of Hierarchical Alignment Systems concerns only transitive, or at least only bivalent, verbs. (I cannot imagine what the Inverse Voice of an intransitive verb would be like, or mean). But the whole question of Split-S and/or Fluid-S systems concerns only monovalent, intransitive verbs. So there is no logical reason that a language might not be both Hierarchical and Split-S. ---- eldin