Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity

Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:

> Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:
>
> > Quoting Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>:
> >
> > > Quoting Rob Haden <magwich78@...>:
> > >
> > > > Thanks for your reply, Mathias.  The sentences you list above are
> > > > examples of what I would call "English preposition-omitting
> > > > ambiguity." Prepositions indicating oblique relationships are often
> > > > omitted in casual speech in English, giving rise to sentences like
> > > > "I give John the dog." While such sentences can be sorted out by
> > > > fluent English-speakers via context, they may be difficult for
> > > > others to sort through.
> > >
> > > Sure this has anything to do with dropped prepositions? "I give
> > > John the dog" looks EXTREMELY much like the dative constructions
> > > found in other Germanic languages.
> >
> > Depends on your theory of morphosyntax.  Mark Baker's theory of
> > incorporation holds that N's are not the only lexical heads
> > that may incorporate into verbs.  Prepositions and various kinds
> > of null categories may also incorporate, deriving applicative,
> > causative, antipassive, passive, and generally any valence
> > changing construction.   In the case of the dative-shift
> > construction that you mention, Baker claims that there is a
> > null preposition that governs the NP "John" at D-structure,
> > which incorporates into the verb, forcing "John" to raise to
> > get abstract case.  (Baker really likes these null categories;
> > I myself am rather allergic to them, but that's his argument.)
> > In support of this argument, Baker provides evidence from some
> > Inuit language (West Greenlandic, IIRC) which only allows this
> > kind of dative shift construction when an overt morpheme is
> > present to show the argument structure has changed.  I don't
> > think he would agree that the preposition is "dropped", however;
> > it's just never pronounced at all.
>
> Either I'm misunderstanding you, or this is a complex way of saying that
> English has a null realization of the Germanic dative marker.
> This is assuming that there's no deep difference between a null case ending
> and a null preposition, and that dropping a null element isn't any
> different from keeping it in.
Well, in most brands of Chomskyan syntax, case is an abstract
property or force. It is not so much simply a requirement of the
verb as the result of specific structural relationships holding
between a head and its specifier or complements. Prepositions,
verbs, nouns, etc. *are* those heads, specifiers or complements.
You might think of case as being the skeletal relation in a
tree-structure, and nouns, prepositions, etc. are the flesh of
the sentence.

So, for Chomsky (and adherents of his theory like Baker), there
is a very big difference between case-assigners, like prepositions,
and the cases that they assign.

> But I was thinking diachronically; I'd be very surprised to learn
> that constructions like _I give John the dog_ are reformed from
> things like _I give the dog to John_ rather than cognate to things
> like _Ich gebe ihm den Hund_.
Remember that, for Chomsky and his ilk, diachronic facts are
historical curiosities of no fundamental importance.  He is
only interested in the internal workings of a speaker's grammar
as a window into the human mind.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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