Re: Italian Particles
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, April 22, 2000, 0:26 |
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Tim Smith wrote:
>
> At 07:56 PM 4/19/2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:
> >Tim Smith wrote:
> >> It sounds to me as if what's happening is that Teonaht is "giving in" to
> >> the very widespread cross-linguistic tendency for the topic to go at the
> >> beginning of the sentence, or as close to the beginning as other
> >> constraints allow.
> >>
> >> There's a reason why languages with dominant OSV order are extremely rare.
> >
> >What's that reason, Tim?
>
> The reason is the tendency to put the topic first. (Which, depending on
> how you define "topic", may be even more nearly universal than I thought --
> see Matt's comment on what I said about Malagasy.) In languages that have
> the freedom to move constituents around based on discourse roles, putting
> the topic first is straightforward. In languages that don't have that
> freedom (because they need a fixed constituent order to mark syntactic
> roles), you can't always put the topic first, but you can approximate that
> by putting the subject first, because, more often than not, the subject
> _is_ the topic. (Well, maybe not "more often than not", but certainly more
> often than any other constituent.) So, if you need a rule that assigns
> every syntactic role to a fixed position (as you do in languages like
> English that don't have some other means of marking syntactic roles, such
> as case marking), by far the most common such rule is to put the subject
> first.
What about sentences like, "He wants you to call him, David, I mean."
So... what you're saying is that analytic languages, like English, are
PERFORCE subject first? Or verb subject? Hmmm. I don't see why that
can't be formally broken.
> Obviously that's an oversimplification. For one thing, there's more than
> one kind of topic, as Matt pointed out; a sentence can have both a
> "sentence-level topic" and a "discourse-level topic" which may or may not
> be the same. For another, obviously even languages with very rigid
> constituent-order rules, like English, do have ways of bending those rules
> to mark discourse roles -- for instance, left-dislocation of a
> direct-object topic, as in "bagels, I like".
Well, Teonaht has that too, to be sure. "Them I like, bagels."
It's just that the formal written
Teonaht sentence, no emphasis, is OSV. "Bagels I like." Which may lead
you to ask, well then how do you make "bagels" the topic? "Bagels them
I like." or: "them I like, bagels."
>
> >Why can't the human brain be perfectly capable
> >of
> >thinking object first instead of subject first?
> >
> > Rain, I like it. Small step to: Rain I like.
> > The door, I closed it. The T say: The door I closed.
>
> This is exactly what I'm talking about. You're fronting the object _when
> it's the topic_. It's only when this becomes the default, unmarked order,
> so that the object comes first whether or not it's the topic, that it
> begins to sound "unnatural".
Well Teonaht *is* unnatural. It's a highly literary, formal language
used
for writing and declamation. Vernacular Teonaht has yet to be fully
worked
out in the breadth with which I've developed written Teonaht. It will
probably be much more SOV, and already, in vulgar circles, an accusative
ending (-z) is being attached to objects to enable their migration to
other parts of the sentence (mostly to identify the indefinite object
when the subject switches around and comes first; ex:
Al kohsa tahnz omlo ravvo
my dog birds (obj) HAB-he love
My dog loves birds.
As opposed to:
Tahn al kohsa omlo ravvo.
But this is a slow process, not a conscious change I'm making
"overnight"
(as some people do when they do a major conlang rehaul). It's been
going
on for some years with lots of resistance and confusion. It is
precisely
the problem with topic and focus that T. syntax seems to compound, and
I don't entirely understand it. I didnt set out to create this language
by sitting down and studying comparative grammars. T. is very much a
thing that evolved in linguistic ignorance, and for that reason I'm
deeply
attached to it as an artifact that is more instinctive than it is
logical.
It has its own lilt, its own logic, its own problems, and the OSV is
frankly very fascinating to me. I would like to know where I can get
information about some of the South American OSV languages, and see what
they developed.
> >When they want to emphasize who it is closes the door or likes the rain,
> >they
> >say:
> >
> > Me, rain I like. Me, the door I closed.
>
> Here, the subject is the topic, and you're fronting it.
I never said I wasn't fronting it. But I wonder if the front of the
sentence is always the most natural site of emphasis. Why can't it
be the last thing heard? Rain I like as for me.
> >Want the verb emphasized? Closing of door I did. (Where "of" is a
> >"respect"
> >particle).
>
> Here it sounds like the verb is the topic, and again it's fronted.
I am not summarily opposed to the front as a point of emphasis. What
I'm saying is that the formal T. sentence, with no emphasis, is OSV;
variations of that require a pleonastic pronoun to keep the sentence
OSV:
The door I closed. Me, the door *I* closed.
Since it is so natural for others to hear emphasis in the first word
mentioned, T. has to do something extra to emphasize the object,
obviously. So it resorts, as usual, to pleonasm: The door it I
closed.
There is a subtle emphasis at beginning and end of every sentence in T.,
which suggests that it's the end of the sentence that carries the
weight,
and T puts the verb in that place of honor.
Except, sigh, that with a rule of this sort, T. would have to say "I
closed
the DOOR" if it wanted a focus on door. The Teonim are very reluctant
to
put the object last. I don't know why. It's very complicated. Places
for
emphasis in Teonaht are first, last, but never middle.
> There's something else happening here too, at least as I read these
> sentences. Of course since I'm only reading them, and not hearing you say
> them, I may be reading patterns of stress and intonation into them that
> aren't actually there.
Exactly! Just what I was trying to express!
But it looks to me as if there may also be another
> common pattern showing up here, in addition to the near-universal
> "topic-first" pattern: the "preverbal focus" pattern. The focus (if any)
> is the constituent that receives the most emphasis. It's the most salient
> part of the new information that the speaker is trying to get across,
> whereas the topic is old information, the thing that you're talking about.
> It's a very common pattern (though not a near-universal like the
> "topic-first" pattern) to put the focus immediately before the verb. If
> your second subject-first example is meant to be read as "me, the DOOR I
> closed", where "me" is the topic and "the door" is the focus, then you're
> following this pattern, at least in that sentence. (I'm counting the
> resumptive pronoun "I" as a clitic that's really part of the verb complex,
> not an independent constituent.)
Well, it's almost impossible now, in Teonaht, to omit this clitic,
especially
when you have tense and aspectual information to attach to it. You can
omit
it only if it's in the simple present: Il jentwar Sarah hcosa.
The door Sarah closes.
And from what little I know of Teonaht, I
> have the impression that it lends itself very well to sentences that follow
> that pattern.
No, actually. It seems to do the opposite. The door Sarah closed.
This
puts emphasis subtly on "closed" and on "door." If Sarah is to be
emphasized,
then it's: Sarah the door she closed. Think: TA DA tadada TA DA.
> >I wish I could find some info on OSV languages, so I could see how they
> >function in real life. Teonaht is so entrenched, and the OSV structure
> >is
> >so much a part of elite written language that I'm not going to change
> >it;
> >but Menarilish will be more specifically SOV. What the Teonaht write
> >and
> >what they say in the pub are different things.
>
> FWIW, my guess is that those few natlangs that do have default
> object-initial order (e.g., Hixkaryana) may be going through some sort of
> temporary transitional stage, and that, left to itself, such a language
> would probably evolve out of this stage fairly quickly. ("Quickly" of
> course meaning relative to language evolution in general, which even at its
> fastest is still so slow that it's usually almost imperceptible within a
> human lifetime.) But if it happened to acquire a writing system and
> develop a literary tradition while in that transitional phase, maybe that
> could cause a word order that would otherwise have been unstable and
> short-lived to be artificially frozen, at least in the "high" literary
> register of the language. (Prescriptive grammar tends to be a side effect
> of literary traditions. But prescriptive grammar has only a very limited
> effect on the everyday spoken language.) Does that sound like a plausible
> explanation of what's happening in Teonaht?
Yes, very much so. As I said, the OSV is formal Teonaht, and
Menarilihs, when
I get a better crack at it, will be more SOV. But formal T. was always
meant
to seem a little alien. Formal written Latin bent natural word orders
into
new patterns (compared to vulgar L.) and that's what T. does. If I have
another life time, I'll make the Menarilihs, but I have this compulsive
sense that I have to have formal Teonaht firmly established before I
abandon it for other children. I want it to evolve naturally--not
because
I go in and YANK it around for a couple of weekends.
Sally
============================================================
SALLY CAVES
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves (bragpage)
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html (T. homepage)
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html (all else)
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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