Re: Word Order in typology

From:    Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
> > > On the other hand, Argument roles I would argue do have meaning that
> > > doesn't change from language to language,
> >
> > Not so.  A brief look at Navaho morphosyntax suggests that agentivity
> > is a gradient phenomenon as well, highly dependent on animacy hierarchies.
>
>  I concede this. I've been thinking more about such things recently: I
> think agentivity etc are somewhat similar to colour terms, in that there
> are peaks (centers) that tend to occur as the prototypical example of
> colour terms in languages, but away from the peaks the boundaries can
> shift a little from language to language. But I would argue that the
> prototypical Agent is a notion that all people share. Note I'm not
> claiming that all languages build a lot of grammar around a case/GR/etc
> in which prototypical Agents fall, but I do believe that all people
> share this notion, even if their language only expresses it in a minimal
> way.
I'm still not sure if you're arguing basically along the lines of
Dixon; if so, then I would have to disagree with you, inasmuch as
I think there are plenty of languages where an A-S-O typology doesn't
work (e.g., any split-S language).

>  Also, I don't have problems with statistical methodology really, except
> I still feel that (for the sake of clarity) you should try to find less
> language dependent terms to express your statistical universals in.
> Maybe Agent isn't perfect, but its better than talking about Subjects
> which is clearly a far from universal notion. And if there's something
> better than Agents, Patients etc then I'd be happy to adopt that. :)
Actually, for the overwhelmingly vast majority of the languages of the
world, some kind of subject relation can be identified.  It is this
that is being compared, with some profit.  So it's still not clear to
me why you object so strenuously to comparing how languages encode
grammatical relations (as opposed to the primitives they're composed
of). Contra Chomsky et al., there's lots of reason to believe grammatical
relations have some separate existence in most languages.

> Can you describe the system in Navaho please as well? :)
Basically, within the third person, verbs take two different prefixes
depending on whether NP-1 (to speak relation-neutrally) is higher on
a rather detailed animacy hierarchy than NP-2.  Thus, men outrank women,
humans outrank domesticated animals, domesticated animals outrank wild
animals, wild animals outrank plants, and plants outrank natural forces
and other inanimate objects.  The relative (proto)agentivity is thus
directly encoded on the verb.  This is somewhat similar to hierarchical
languages like in Algonquian, though there it has more to do with
a person hierarchy.

 =========================================================================
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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