German [was Re: Sketch of Germanech 4/4: Syntax]

> > subjects of non-active intransitive verbs were in accusative case!
>
> Wow!  Latin dialects did that!?  I know some very few sentences in
> German that do that, and they vanish soon in Modern German:
>
>    Mich friert.    (Modern: Ich friere.)
>    Mir ist Angst.  (Modern: Ich habe Angst.)
Yeah. These are called unaccusative verbs, since under
most current analyses, the surface <mich> starts out at as a
compliment of the verb. The English word "freeze" operates
in the same way:

  (1) The water froze.                    (Unaccusative)
      *It(exp) froze the water.
        (where "it" is expletive)
      The man froze the water. (=Causative)
  (2) The man laughed                     ("Unergative")
      *It(exp) laughed the man.
      *The comedian laughed the audience.

One possible piece of evidence against this are those
dialects of English where you can get an idiom chunk
like this:

  (3) A cloud is coming up. (i.e., There will be a
      thunderstorm)
      It(exp) come up a cloud.

I don't know if the following is grammatical:

      ?The sky came up a cloud. (=Causative)

Or somesuch thing.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
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