Re: deeply embedded VSO nightmare

--- Keith wrote:
Given that
verbs frequently inflect for subject, or incorporate the subject pronoun
as a clitic or infix of some kind and that this type of marking is often
compulsory, whereas object incorporation is less common and usually
optional, I'd be inclined to say that verbs generally bind more closely
to their subjects than to their objects.
--- end of quote ---

You're using "incorporate" in a different way from the way it's usually used in
(transformational) syntax. Usually one says that the subject marker
attaches/citicizes to the verb. Incorporation refers to constructions in which,
say, a noun forms a morphological unit with the verb that it's an argument of.
Compare the following sentences from Mohawk: In the first sentence, the object
"money" constitutes a phrase of its own; in the second sentence "money" and
"lose" form a kind of compound verb (cf. English constructions like
"deer-hunting").

  Pat wa'-ha-htu'ta' ne' ohwista'
  Pat PAST-3s/3s-lose the money
  "Pat lost the money"

  Pat wa'-ha-hwist-ahtu'ta'
  Pat PAST-3s/3s-money-lose
  "Pat lost money"

In this sense of the term, incorporation of objects is actually *much* more
common than incorporation of subjects. In fact, incorporation of subjects is
quite marginal, and most cases where it does occur it involves intransitive
verbs whose subjects have various object-like properties.

A major piece of evidence for arguing that objects 'bind' more closely to the
verb than subjects do (even in VSO languages) is that verbs much more readily
form word-like units ('idioms') with their objects than they do with their
subjects. English, for example, has idioms in which the entire sentence has an
idiosyncratic meaning:

  The shit hit the fan.

And idioms in which the verb and object together have an idiosyncratic meaning,
but the subject has a 'literal' interpretation:

  Pat kicked the bucket.

"X kicked the bucket" means "X died", where X can vary.

However, there are no idioms in English--at least, none that I can think of--which
consist of a verb and its subject, the object having a literal interpretation
and varying from context to context. For example, we could imagine a
hypothetical idiom of the form "The toaster burned X" meaning "X went
bankrupt":

  The toaster burned Pat  (= Pat went bankrupt)
  The toaster burned my brother  (= My brother went bankrupt)

But no such idioms exist in English. In fact, it's been claimed that no language
anywhere has such idioms. If we assume that idioms are stored in our mental
dictionaries as phrases (constituents), then we could take this observation (if
true) as evidence that languages treat a verb and its object as a phrase, to
the exclusion of the subject of that phrase (at least underlyingly).

Matt.

Matt Pearson
Department of Linguistics
Reed College
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd
Portland, OR 97202 USA
ph:  503-771-1112 (x 7618)

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