Re: Inverse marking (was: Kijeb text uploaded)

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