Re: Word Order in typology

>
> 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.
>
I suppose you could argue that subject does exist as a notion in some
ergative languages, even though it isn't exhibited in the morphology.
For example,

He passed the man and stopped

Would generally be interpreted as he stopped, not the man stopped, so
the two verbs automatically share the same subject even though that
subject is ergative in one and absolutive in another. I'm not convinced
that trigger languages exhibit the notion of subject to any large degree
though, and I've seen no proof that this is true of all ergative
languages either. :)

> [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'.
>
I guess not. :) The problem with a lot of science, and I guess
linguistics, is that people try to distort the facts or the established
theories slightly so that strong evidence that the current theories are
very wrong fits. You just have to look at electromagnetism and the magic
"ether" that appeared along with the assertion that the laws only hold
in the Absolute frame, because the physicists didn't dare consider that
the Galilean transformation would have to be scrapped. And of course it
was... when Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein derived the Lorentz
transformation, and Einstein wrote a paper on Special Relativity. :)


> 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?
>
I was never a fan of Quantum Mechanics... I've not done that much on it
at university :) I'm more of a classical mathematician, so I can't
answer your question. :)


> [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?
>
I'm not arguing that GRs are useless... only that they are useless as a
grounding for the study of language, because they are not language
independent. :) It seems strange to me to base the study of language on
terms which do not have the same properties for each object under
study... take group theory for instance. The following are the axioms
for a group G:

i) Closure under the group operation. If a,b are in G, then a + b is in G.
ii) Existence of Identity. There exists an element denoted 0 s.t a + 0 =
0 + a = a
iii) Existence of Inverse. For each a, there exists a b s.t a + b = b +
a = 0
iv) Associativity. For all a,b,c (a + b) + c = a + (b + c)

Now the exact form a group takes may vary, but if I know something is a
group I know these things are true. If they were not, if there were some
groups where there was no identity for example, then the whole of
current group theory would just collapse. I have no object with using
GRs in linguistic theory, but they shouldn't appear at all in the basis
of linguistics, since they seem to me to be a language dependent
structure built on top of other language independent structures. So any
study of GRs should be done by considering how they related to other
notions that aren't language dependent, and how languages group those
concepts together to form GRs.


>> 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.
>
I am not arguing at all that we shouldn't study surface phenomena, but
the study of surface phenomena must be grounded in the study of deep
phenomena as much as possible. My main argument was that the universals
regarding word order should be specifying that order using surface
phenomina which aren't exhibited by all languages.

>> 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.
>
It seems to me to be the most sensible idea. :) Not because of inbuilt
case (I do not believe in the large scale language specific structures
in the brain which Chomsky claims exist.... I believe that language is
shaped by shared enviroment and experience, and that the structures that
are inbuilt from the beginning for language as very general: probably an
area of the brain very good at parsing trees etc), but because humans do
think about the same things because our experience shapes us that way:
its natural to divide the world into those that do things (Actors),
those that have things done to them (Patients), things that are used in
doing an action (Instruments... tools are the basis of our civilization
after all, along with language), etc. Given these categories that all
people understand and share (although of course there are small shifts
in the boundary between them from person to person), language then
arises which groups these into a very limited set of GRs etc... I would
argue that case and GRs are surface realizations of deeper phenomena,
given rise to by the limitations inherent in our communication medium
(Each utterance takes time, so the transmission times is obviously not
zero), and in our brains (increasing the number of core distinctions
increases processing time and the difficulty of parsing... so we make
simplifications).

>> 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.
>
I believe there must be such deep universals. :)

> 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.
>
Yes but these must be grounded in deeper structures. ANd to take the
examples I was talking about:

If  the main word order is SOV then...

The condition talks of a surface realization which may not be exhibited
in a given language, so the universal is not applicable to all
languages, and thus flawed, since the whole point is to try to find
phenoma true of all (or at least 99.9%) of languages.

> 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

No, grammar does exist. :)

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