Re: Inverse marking (was: Kijeb text uploaded)

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:30:00 -0400, Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
wrote:
>On 4/21/06, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
>[snip]
>>I believe there are Meso-American and South-American languages, thousands
>>of miles away from Canada, that have these systems, too.
>Yup.  (see below)
http://ninacat.tranzfusion.net/Voice%20and%20Inverse%20Systems.pdf
says
"Givon 1994" ("Voice and Inversion", John Benjamins Publishing Company)
says
"I. Purely Pragmatic Inverse Clause

I.A. Purely Word-Order Inverse
Chepang
Modern Greek
Korean
Biblical Hebrew
Cebuano
Maasai-I

I.B. Mixed Word-Order and Pronominal Inverse
Kimbundu
Dzamba
Sahaptin-I

I.C. Purely Pronominal-Morphological Inverse
Kokuyon

II. Shared Pragmatic-Semantic Inverse Clause

II.A. Purely Word-Order Inverse
none

II.B. Mixed Word-Order and Pronominal Inverse
Chamorro in-
Squamish
Bella Coola
probably Plains Cree

II.C. Purely Pronominal-Morphological Inverse
Kutenai?

III. Purely Semantic Inverse Clause

III.A. Purely Word-Order Inverse
none

III.B. Mixed Word-Order and Pronominal Inverse
Sahaptin-II

III.C. Purely Pronominal-Morphological Inverse
Maasai-II
Tupi-Guarani


>[snip]
>>>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.)
Could you be talking about:

Bibliographic information
Title On Reconstructing Grammar
Author(s) Spike Gildea
Publisher Oxford University Press US
Publication Date Sep 1, 1998
Subject Language Arts / Linguistics / Literacy
Format Hardcover
Pages 304
ISBN 019510952X
http://books.google.com/books?id=MTTZk5O11tgC&dq=%22Gildea%22+%
22On+Reconstructing+Grammar:+Comparative+Cariban+Morphosyntax%22+

?


>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.
If you're talking about the book I asked about, a look at its table of
contents makes it seem that something like that idea occurred to Gildea.

Among his chapter and section titles are:
"5.1 Word Order: Direct and Local versus 3A3O versus Inverse"
"7.2 The Ergative Morphosyntax of Cariban Nominalizations"
"9 The Full Set II Verbal System (Ergative)"
"9.3 The *-tupu and *-sapo Past Perfectives: An S/O Pivot"
"10 The Partial Set II Verbal System (Ergative/Nominative)"
"10.1 The Simple Nominalization Source with an S/A Pivot"
"10.2 The Attributive Source with an S/A Pivot"
"11 The De-Ergative System (Nominative)"
"11.2 The Panare Subject Focus Morpheme"
"12 The Progressive Verbal System (Nominative)"
"13 The *t-V-ce Verbal System (Ergative)"
"13.2 Stage III: Inverse Voice in Carib of Surinam"
"13.3 Between Inverse and Ergative: the *t-V-ce Construction in Apalai"
"14 The *t-V-ce-mi Verbal System (Nominative)"
"15.3 On the Passive as the Universal Source of Ergativity"
"15.4 Universals of Split Ergativity: a Transitional Violation"

-----

Gildea seems to be saying, in the smallish excerpt I was allowed to read on-
line, that certain terminology developed in studying Algonquian languages
can, with small modifications, be applied to the Cariban languages.

In particular, he divides bivalent or monotransitive clauses into four
groups as follows:

"Local":
Agent(s) is/are SAP(s) and
Patient(s) is/are SAP(s)

"Non-Local":
Agent(s) is/are 3rd person(s) and
Patient(s) is/are 3rd person(s)

"Direct":
Agent(s) is/are SAP(s) and
Patient(s) is/are 3rd person(s)

"Inverse":
Agent(s) is/are 3rd person(s) and
Patient(s) is/are SAP(s)

(note SAP stands for Speech-Act-Participant and includes first-person,
second-person, and inclusive.)

He distinguishes between "semantic" and "pragmatic" direct or inverse or
local or non-local; and uses both the "semantic" and the "pragmatic"
versions of these classifications in the book -- as near as I can tell.

-----

eldin

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