Re: Marking and Imperatives

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Ed Heil wrote:
> > So there's no reason that the first person would be equally unmarked
> > in the past tense; in the past tense, the verb is not a performative.
>
> Hmm, I didn't think about that.  That's a good point there.  In
> nonpresent tenses, it's a description of an act that was done/will be
> done.
>
> On the other hand, other performatives don't allow "I" to be dropped,
> you can't say "Command you to go", so it still seems to be unique to the
> verb "thank".
Yes, but I can't think of any other performatives used as often as
"thank," and frequency of usage seems to be a criterion for unmarked
forms (at least according to Croft, _Typology and Universals_, which
is where I'm getting all this).  "Command" doesn't have to be used,
because we have the imperative... though you might think of an
imperative as "I command that you..." reduced to a zero morph!

> > I guess I'm not sure what the theoretical difference is between a
> > "mere exception" which is a "contraction of a common phrase" and a
> > genuine example of morphological unmarkedness.
>
> Well, if it were morphological unmarkedness, one would expect other
> similar verbs to drop the "I".
If there *are* other similar verbs... Which it's not clear to me
there are.

But let me restate more conservatively: I suspect that the lack of a
pronoun in "thank you" is essentially a similar phenomenon to the lack
of a pronoun in the second person present imperative in English, and
to morphological unmarkedness generally.

> Still, that introduces an interesting question: *are* there languages
> where 1st person singular is unmarked in performative verbs?
Very good question!

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Ed doesn't know everything, but he hasn't figured that out yet.
Please break it to him gently.              edheil@postmark.net
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