Re: Word Order in typology

Sorry, I'm making my way through these messages a good five days late, so
please bear with me if I repeat information that someone else may already
have given.  I've just rejoined CONLANG and the message volume is
overwhelming.  Are we still allowed only five posts per day?  I have to
govern my time carefully anyway, and last night's weird post (!!) counts as
one for today.  So I'm three deep already.

----- Original Message -----
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>

About mir ist kalt:
> That's a possible way to explain this function of the dative. I think the
> traditional term for it is 'experiencer'. But experiencer and recipient
> are semantically related.
>
> I get the feeling that in the older stages of Indoeuropean, many verbs
> that expressed feelings and sensations didn't have an animate nominative
> (agent), but an animate dative (experiencer). These experiencer
> constructions evoke that thoughts/feelings/impressions happen to the
> people rather than that the people actively cause them.
That's how I understand this development, and also the impersonal verbs in
Old English which were subjectless, and cast the experiencer in the dative:
me thinketh, "[it] seems to me"; early Middle English: me reweth "[it] is
painful to me"; this latter became "I rue,"  i.e., "I regret," "I feel pain
for."  Long years ago we had this very same discussion when Matt Pearson was
describing the earlier stages of his ergative language Tokana [I seem to be
talking a lot about Matt today!]; IIRC he cast a number of his
thinking/feeling "subjects" in the dative, and I asked him if what I had
read was true: that IE may have gone from ergative or active to accusative,
with vestiges of a system that cast the experiencer of sensations and
feelings in the dative. This is speculative, of course.  It may also have
favored postpositions and SOV structure, as in the OE Harold hem feaht with.
"Harold fought against them."  I think there was a recent post about
postpositions, or rather postpositional conjunctions: the discussion of
Latin -que and its survival.

>>Unless I have been
>>completely misinformed, I believe "Ich bin kalt" is also possible German,
>>tho with the meaning: 'I am [sexually] frigid'.
Well, it's that in French, I believe.  !  Someone can correct me, but you
get laughed at if you say "Je suis froid" when you mean "J'ai froid."

> It could be used in that sense, but to me, this seems rather a unusual
> use. You may have messed it up with "heiss sein" (to be hot). Someone
> (Swiss or German) told that a German girl had asked him how to say "mir
> ist heiss" in English. He said she should say "I am hot", and got a slap
> in his face because she believed he wanted to make her say "I am sexy".
Ha!  That's a keeper!

> However, you can also say "ich habe kalt/heiss" (I have cold/hot), and to
> me, this seems even a little bit more usual than "mir ist heiss/kalt" (to-
> me is hot/cold), which might be but a regional preference, I don't know.
My house is very cold, right now.  The weather's cold, the heat isn't on,
I'm cold, I'm shivering, my hands are freezing... it's taken so for granted
in English that coldness is an attribute a person can share with the house
and the weather.  I remember hearing how it's expressed in French, German
and Welsh and thinking why it is that in English we haven't retained these
important distinctions.  We aren't inanimate objects.

>>> unless it is the
>>> null-pronoun 'es' used for valence-0 sentences like 'Es ist kalt.', so
>>> you could say 'Es ist mir kalt.'/'Mir ist es kalt.'  But that's no
>>> subject, it cannot be gapped:
>>>
>>>     *Mir ist es kalt und regnet.
>>>      Mir ist es kalt, und es regnet.
>>>
>>> This type of 'es' is purely syntactic.
>>
>>Yes, like _il_ [masc.] in French _il pleut_, _hi_ [fem.] in Welsh _mae hi'
>>n glawio_ or the _it_ [neut.] in English _it is raining_. yes, they aare
>>'dummy subjects_ required by the syntax of the languages.
>
> The German dummy subject has another funny use. Count the number of
> subjects of the following sentence:
>
> "Es liegt ein Schatz im grünen Rhein." (It lies a treasure NOM in-the
> green Rhine.) 'A treasure lies in the green Rhine.
>
> This sentence has appearently two subject! But the "es" can easily be
> dropped:
>
> "Ein Schatz liegt im grünen Rhein."
I believe it!  :) Could an accurate translation of "Es liegt ein Schatz" be
"there lies a treasure"?  English makes good use of dummy subjects with
"there" and "it" sometimes referred to as "expletives": they fill out the
perceived missing subject, so me thinketh, methinks,  became, eventually,
"IT seems to me."  Same with "there," put before OE expressions like "is a
treasure," "is some milk," etc.

> The "es" can even pre-repeat a plural subject:
>
> "Es sprachen zwei Männer miteinander." (It spoke two men NOM with each
> other.) 'Two men spoke with each other.
Interesting!  An English equivalent might be "There are two men speaking,"
which often gets turned to "there's two men speaking" in vernacular uses.
"There's squirrels on the roof."  Very common in America.

> I suspect this use of the "es" is best explained with speech rhythm.
Could be. "Squirrels are on the roof" just doesn't flow.  :)  Of course,
that's how Teonaht does it.   "On the roof squirrels."  Boring!  However,
one "feels" cold in Teonaht; one isn't cold, like a roof, like water; but
the subject (still a solid subject in the rules of T) is an experiencer, and
takes an experiential verb in "feels," not the volitional "feel, touch."

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teotax.html