Re: Tagalog & trigger idea: I'd like comments. :)

Hi!

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 10:44:48PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
>...
> >    giver     -> nominative:  der Mann
> >    recipient -> dative:      der Frau
> >    patient   -> accusative:  die Blume
>
> Interesting, I didn't think of this aspect of it. But, Tatari Faran
> does not have passives.
Yes, but I only gave them for comparison to English.  Maybe I should've
left them out to compare to Tatari Faran. :-)

> The fronted NP also takes a "nominative" role
> in a sense. This doesn't quite show in these examples because a
> relatively simple sentence is involved; but it becomes clearer if you
> tack on several clauses together:
>
> diru nei kira firasa sei kiran ka esan, henan dei niba' tara' ka tsum.
> "The girl was given flowers by the young man, and he kissed [her]."
>
> firasa sei kira kiran ka diru nei esan, henan dei niba' tara' ka tsum.
> "The flowers were given to the girl by the young man, and he kissed
> [the flowers]."
>...
This is clearly different from German, yes.  (I would have been
surprised if you had accidentally found German's structure. :-)))

But Tatari Faran is not pro-drop, is it?  Then things would be
different, because I'd expect any elided constituent to refer to
whatever is most sensible.  And the focus is sensible. :-) Then the
whole structure would work on semantic level instead of on syntactic
elipsis level as in 'I carried a vase and fell.'  But from how you
describe them, I suppose you mean the above structures are purely
syntactical.

>...
> This is where a fundamental difference occurs: the case markings of
> the NP's in Tatari Faran cannot change without also changing the
> factual content of the sentence. There is no such thing as passive
> verbs in TF. If you change the marking of _diru_ to originative, the
> girl becomes the giver rather than the recipient.
Sorry, the passive voice examples where superfluous in my posting.

> Hmm OK, so what Tatari Faran has isn't triggers after all. :-)
HAHA! :-)

> But I don't think you can say Tatari Faran is accusative.
Definitely not.  I would not dare to. :-)

> The case assignments are purely semantically-based, and you can't
> change the case of an NP without also changing its semantic
> role.
Right.  I'd also hesitate to call is split-S, however, because you
have unique case names. :-)

**Henrik

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