Re: Word Order in typology

Thomas R. Wier wrote:

>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).
>
>
>
A split-S system splits between Ergative and Accusative marking on NPs
right? Then such languages definitely exhibit the concept of Agent, but
Agent is marked in a different way (Ergative in some cases, Nominative
in others) based on other factors (animacy, aspect, tense or some other).


>> 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.
>
>
>
I have never argued that Grammatical relations don't exist. :) What I
have argued is that they vary a lot from language to language (and some
GRs may not be exhibited in some languages), so its not really good to
use them for the study of languages as a whole in the way that they are
in for example Greenberg's Universals. If grammatical relations occur at
all in language universals, it ought to be on the other end of the
implication, eg:

If language X.... then it exhibits the GR of subject defined by ........

or, the assumption that a language possesses a subject ought to be
explicitly stated, eg:

If language X possesses the concept of subject and the subject usually
precedes the verb in main clauses then......

>>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.
>
>
>
Again, such a system much exhibit the notion of Agent in order to
determine whether the Agent is higher in animacy than the Patient or
not. Unless I've misunderstood your explanation. If Navaho speakers
didn't understand the concept of Agent then they couldn't possibly use
this system, because they wouldn't know what argument they were
comparing with what to determine the relative-animacy.