Re: Circumfixes?

> Date:         Thu, 7 Jun 2001 10:10:06 -0400
> From: "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>
>
> David wrote:
>
> >     This reminded me of something... In Spanish the word order is
> >SVO, and sometimes SOV when you get object pronouns thrown in (and,
> >then again, sometimes not), but here's the one that makes me
> >wonder: "Me gusta la radio". Here, the subject is the radio, and
> >"I" is the object, so the order, then, is OVS. What's up with that?
>
> I should think this is more a pragmatic (if that's the right word)
> than a grammatical consideration. While it's true that strictly
> grammatically speaking, it's OVS, due to the nature of the verb
> "gustar", "to be pleasing", from a pragmatic standpoint it's Mom's
> apple pie SVO: "I like radio." It seems to me akin to "Mir ist
> kalt.", "I'm cold." and the antiquated "Me thinks..." (Actually,
> having just written that...Wasn't this touched on a long while ago
> on the list?)
The phenomenon is called quirky case; from a Google search, it seems
that the canonical examples are Icelandic and Hindi. But many other
languages have traces of it, like the examples just given.

If you only have a few odd phrases, it can be hard to be sure what is
going on. In Icelandic however, where they are quite common, there is
no doubt that these are syntactical subjects, not just fronted oblique
arguments.

I found a nice article with lots of examples from both Modern
Icelandic and the sagas: <URL:http://www.hi.is/~eirikur/quirkysb.pdf>.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)