Re: Word Order in typology

On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 09:14 , Trebor Jung wrote:

> Chris írta: "[Why] don't we say AVP instead of SVO etc?"
>
> The terms "subject" and "object" deal with syntactic roles. OTOH, "agent"
> and "patient" deal with argument roles.
..or rather _semantic_ roles.

> The terms are not interchangeable,
Indeed, they are not: 'subject' and 'object' deal with _grammatical_
relations and are identified grammatically.

On the other hand 'agent' and 'patient' refer to _semantic_ roles.
Sometimes 'agent' and 'subject' coincide, but by no means always for as
Trebor observes:
> since in many Western languages at least, subjects can be agents,
> patients,
> or experiencers (even tho they're marked with different cases-- but that'
> s a
> different story altogether!).
Confusion may arise from the fact that Agent and Patient are 'deep cases'
in Case Grammar theory - but that is another story   :)
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On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 10:17 , Chris Bates wrote:

> But if we're talking about syntactic roles then SVO et al aren't
> applicable at all to many languages which organise such things
> differently. So universals talking about SVO etc are meaningless for
> many languages, which makes them kind of useless.
I think 'grammatical role' rather than narrowly 'syntactic role' is a
better way of describing subject and object, since the marking may be made
by morphology and/or by syntax. Yes, in ergative languages the terms
'subject' and 'object' don't make much sense; there the terms 'absolutive'
  and 'ergative' are used to designate the main grammatical roles of NPs.

I think it has long been recognized that the so-called 'universals' are
not universal. At best they are tendencies which apply to a (very) large
number of languages. But I agree that applying SVO 'universals' to
language like Basque is pretty meaningless.
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On Monday, October 11, 2004, at 11:18 , Chris Bates wrote:

> Looking at Wikipedia
[snip]
> e and in
> fact seem quite vague? Looking further at
> http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsASubject.htm,
> the definition given seems to be a list of conditions that might
> possibly be satisfied by a subject and thus rather useless
It is true there is no succinct definition of 'subject' that I know of.
Trask similarly gives a longish list of conditions that might be satisfied.
  But I think it is exaggerating to say that the concept is rather useless.

A familiarity with language make it fairly easy to spot what is the
subject vis-a-vis the verb in very many quite different languages of the
accusative type of language (quite common across our globe). Indeed, as I
have said, in ergative type of language 'subject' is not a grammatical
role anyway.

[snip]

> are in practice useless. I don't mean to disparage anyone who's a
> professional linguist, but I find a lot of linguistics to be a load of
> complete rubbish, or at least something strictly intuitive pretending to
> be rigorous. If you can't define something properly you should be
> honest, rather than pretending that your art is a science.
I'm not a professional linguist but, with respect, I find this a rather
short-sighted view. For centuries the physical explanation of fire was not
known or was misunderstood. At one time physicists had a theory about
'phlogiston'. We now know this is wrong. It doesn't mean that until modern
science appeared all previous attempts at science was merely 'art'.

A grammatical phenomenon called 'subject' has been noted for a very long
time. A similar grammatical phenomenon has been noted in many other
unrelated languages. Because we have not managed to come up with a nice,
succinct definition does not mean that investigators are not being
rigorous. In fact - quite the opposite. If linguists were, as you suggest,
  simply working by intuition while pretending to be rigorous, then would
it not be likely that a 'pretend' rigorous definition would exist?

It will be found in the history of science that because of the state of
knowledge & research at the time a rigorous definition of some phenomenon
or other is not possible. Even now, is everything in quantum physics
rigorously defined?

[snip]
> On the other hand, Argument roles I would argue do have meaning that
> doesn't change from language to language,
Hang on - _argument_ roles may be defined _either_ grammatically (subject,
  object etc) _or_ semantically (agent, patient etc). If I understand your
argument you are saying that grammatical arguments are fairly meaningless.
  But how then are we to explain the grammar of a particular language?

> as do topic and focus...
I think there are grey areas regarding topic/comment & focus.

> how
> the case system, word order etc separate out (or not) various argument
> roles varies from language to language and from verb to verb,
Yes!! and if we are to understand the way the language works we surely
need to know this.

> but when I
> talk of an Agent, the idea is easily communicable no matter what
> language you speak, and you don't need to know a massive amount of
> linguistics to have it explained to you.
But you do need the linguistics to see how agent and other semantic roles
actually work out in a given language.

> Structures built on top of
> concepts like these, which do vary from language to language,
Ah, now that is hinting at the 'deep case' idea - a controversial and not
universally held idea.

> don't seem
> to me to be the right areas of study for universals, since their exact
> meaning and scope is far from independent of the language under study.
This begs the whole question of the search for universals. It also invites
the question whether there are 'deep universals' and that all the
differences are in the generation of surface realizations.

To summarize, your position as I understand it is that grammatical
relations are intuitive concepts and relative to individual languages
while semantic relations are easily defined and are language independent.
If you hold such a view then obviously it is at the semantic level you
look for absolute universals. But that is not going to help a language
designer because s/he has to present a surface view (assuming the idea of
deep level & surface). It still seems reasonable to look for certain
general tendencies in the way languages map their surface structures.

Grammar does exist IMO or do you think all so-called grammatical features
are explainable in terms of semantics?
(That is a genuine question - I hope it does not sound aggressive; it is
not intended to be.)

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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