Re: Word Order in typology
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, October 13, 2004, 6:17 |
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On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, at 09:57 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>:
>
>> 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. The terms are not
>> interchangeable,
>> 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!).
>
> What Western languages can mark subjects with different cases?
>
> Basque, of course, and German if you interpret the dative as a subject in
> sentences like _Mir ist kalt_ - that seems perverse to me,
... and to me also. As I have argued elsewhere, 'subject' denotes a
_grammatical_ relationship. One of the marks of the subject is verbal
agreement. In the German sentence 'ist' is 3rd singular. It would be very
perverse IMO to say it is in agreement with a subject in the dative case.
> but a sufficient
> proportion of books do it that I guess there's some tolerably good reason
> to do
> it -, anything else? No, English "methinks" doesn' count however you
> analyze it!
Certainly not. 'me' was originally the _object_ of the impersonal 3rd
singular 'thinks' (seems).
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On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, at 12:44 , Henrik Theiling wrote:
[snip]
> Icelandic has a lot more of the 'Mir ist kalt.' style dative subjects
> and even some accusative ones. Sometimes those sentences are archaic
> in German, sometimes they are totally ungrammatical when translated
> literally.
>
> IS: Mig thyrsta.
> ACC
>
> DE: Mich dürstet. (archaic)
> ACC
> Ich habe Durst.
No, no. Why construe them as subjects, when all the grammatical signs
point against it? Just because modern German has "Ich habe Durst", French
has "j'ai soif" and English has "I am thirsty"? Because the person
suffering thirst in those three languages is subject surely does not mean
the person has to be subject in every language?
The grammatical subject has a tendency to be the same a the semantic agent.
The person who is thirsty is hardly the semantic agent, so it should not
be at all surprising if many languages do not make the person the
grammatical subject. Indeed, the Icelandic construction seems more logical
in that the direct object has a tendency to be the semantic 'patient'. The
person who is thirsty is surely either the patient or recipient?
The Welsh equivalent is:
Mae syched arna i.
Is thirst on me.
There is no way anyone is going to persuade me that _arna i_ (on me) is
the grammatical subject! Indeed, the noun _syched_ is clearly the subject
of the verb 'mae'. So why must I accept the Icelandic 'mig' as subject? I
don't.
The same consideration applies to "mir ist kalt" - I am hardly the
semantic agent. The dative indeed implies that I am the recipient of
coldness - and on cold days that exactly how I feel. Unless I have been
completely misinformed, I believe "Ich bin kalt" is also possible German,
tho with the meaning: 'I am [sexually] frigid'. If that is so, it seems
even odder to me to claim that 'mir' is subject in "mir ist kalt" & 'ich'
is subject in "ich bin kalt".
Mae eisiau arian arna i.
Is lack of-money on me. (_eisiau_ is the grammatical subject)
Again 'I' in English is hardly the agent - so it is not surprising to me
that different languages treat this differently.
> And the problem with not analysing 'mir' as a subject here is that
> there is no other subject that is left out or something. It is
> impossible to add a nominative NP to those sentences,
But why do we need a nominative NP. Many languages have verbs with no
grammatical subjects. The can be no NP subject of Latin _pluit_, Spanish
_llove_, Italian _piove_ (it is raining). In Latin we even have
intransitive verbs with 'impersonal' passives like _itur_ (on va; we go,
they go, people go etc); there is and cannot be any grammatical subject of
_itur_.
> 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.
> Therefore I think it's at least pragmatic to say that 'mir' is the
> subject.
The fact that the 'dummy' _es_ may be used in "es ist mir kalt" seems to
me to argue against this.
> Further, the above site gives an example where a
> non-nominative subject can be deleted in Icelandic:
>
> IS: Ég sá stúlkuna og (mér) líkaði vel við hana.
> (Icelandic)
> I:NOM saw the.girl:ACC and (me:DATIVE) liked well with her
> I saw the girl and (I) liked her.
>
> Although I'd translate 'við' more like 'to'/'towards' ('with' is
> 'með'). But I'm not at all an expert on Icelandic.
>
> Let's try this for German:
>
> DE: Ich sah das Mädchen, und sie gefällt [mir] gut.
>
> This is correct, but it is a bit strange.
As one brought up on the Greek & Latin classics, I find nothing strange in
the above sentences and in the 'old days' we construed such things with
the notion of 'ellipsis' without resorting to "dative subjects".
=================================================
> On Tuesday, October 12, 2004, at 01:49 , Henrik Theiling wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> writes:
>> Quoting Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>:
>>> ...
>>> *Mir ist es kalt und regnet.
>>> Mir ist es kalt, und es regnet.
>>>
>>> This type of 'es' is purely syntactic.
>>
>> The part I'm not getting is why there absolutely must be a subject in
>> these
>> sentences. As you say, _es_ in _es regnet_ isn't a real subject; why
>> couldn't
>> then _mir ist kalt_ not lack a subject entirely?
Indeed, why not?
> Aha! I don't know. :-) Maybe that's also a possible analysis.
>
It is, it is :-)
Ray
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