Continuing the morphology and syntax discussion

[Bernie Francis]

Hi Richard,

I wasn't planning on jumping into this but I'll throw out a couple of things to you re animacy/inanimacy at least in Mi'kmaw.

The tree fell on the house is easily translated in Mi'kmaw as "Kmu'j eloqtesink+p wen'ji'kuomk."

kmu'j = tree

el = directional (that way)

-oq = long shaped

-tes = sudden/jerky movement

-i = stative 

-k = animate

-+p = past (plus sign represents schwa)

wen'ji- = french

-kuom = dwelling

-k = locative

The car ran into a tree. "Wutepaqn na't wen me'teskuapnn kmu'jl." ('ran' of course is out of character here. One would use 'to hit' or 'to bump into' since cars can't run) Therefore "Someone's car hit/bumped into a tree."

W = 3rd per. possessive

-utepaqn = car inan.

na't wen = someone

me'tesk = bump into

-uap = past

n = an.

n = obv.  ('l' in Restigouche dialect)

kmu'j = tree an.

l = obv. an.

At least in Mi'kmaw Richard, there's nothing ungrammatical about the 2nd sentence.

Sometime, animacy/inanimacy is determined by distance, i.e., a bus on my reserve is inanimate because (I believe) it's walking distance to town. In Eskasoni a reserve which is 30 miles from Sydney, N.S., it is animate. Yet, my theory falls down when I realize that a motorcycle is inanimate on my reserve but animate in Eskasoni.

A fridge is always animate probably because it's very important in the household whereas a TV is inanimate (or so I thought). I discovered later that only the box around the TV is inanimate whereas the picture tube is animate. The new flat screen TV has grammatically taken on the inanimacy like the older sets.

Inanimate objects in Mi'kmaw can easily become animate. It is we Mi'kmaq who may imbue that object with a spirit causing it to become animate. We can do this by recreating it in some way.

I don't know if I helped or made things even more complicated. In any event I decided to send it along for your perusal.

Good luck Richard.

berni francis


Sent from my iPad

On 2012-11-01, at 8:04 PM, "Richard RHODES" <rrhodes at BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:

> Charles (and everyone listening in),
> 
>     I think the hardcore linguists are concerned about just how much this discussion will be "inside baseball".
> 
>     To whit, Julie presented a wonderful paper on the relevance of sentience in the formation of Innu intransitive verbs.
> 
>     The general background is this: everyone knows that the class of "natural" animates are those things that are or appear to be capable of moving under their own power. Hence, cars, trains, and big boats. (These are opposed to words that are purely grammatical animates, like trees and blackberries, tobacco and pipes, and the like.) For some time, people have been observing that there are syntactic restrictions on grammatical animates that are not "natural" animates. So many languages have restrictions on straightforward translations of clauses like:
> 
> The tree fell on the house.
> 
> Words that are not "natural" animates are banned (or at least greatly dispreferred) as the subjects of TI's. (If any of the native speakers out there find such clauses OK in their language, I'd sure like to know.)
> 
> Trickier are sentences like:
> 
> The car ran into the tree.
> 
> Most of my consultants in Ottawa find such sentences completely ungrammatical, or at the least very weird. But no one has worked much on the problem.
> 
> So that brings us to Julie's paper. She argued from features of II verb derivation that there is a three distinction in animacy. She called the most animate entities sentient. Those that are capable of some kinds of self-action, but not of awareness (my terms, not hers) teleological. (The view is more nuanced, but this will do for now.) And all the rest are inanimate. At that point, some of us would have said she had a paper and could have walked away.
> 
> But, of course, she didn't. Julie wants to do more. So she spent a good deal of her paper talking about the mechanics of placing the relevant part of verb structure in a particular place in the pre-fab structure dictated by the approach to syntax she ascribes to.
> 
> Phil Lesourd and I asked whether seeking a structural solution was the right way to go.
> 
> My question was based on the English example which was provably semantic, not structural. Phil's question was more general.
> 
> But the whole discussion got bogged down. Julie seemed to be saying that there's great value in UG -- which neither Phil nor I believe -- and that's as far as it got.
> 
> More later,
> 
> Rich
> 
>  
> 
> On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:25:28 -0400, Charles Bishop wrote:
> 
> Hi Richard,
> Sorry that I couldn't be at this year's AC.   What was Julie's point?
> Charles
> 
> On Oct 30, 2012, at 4:07 PM, Richard RHODES wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 
> I'm just putting out a feeler to see if there is interest in continuing the syntax morphology discussion online.
> 
> It seemed like Julie Brittain's paper on Sunday morning put us right in the middle of it again, but half of the folks were already gone by then.
> 
> Let me know if it's worth talking in this venue.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rich Rhodes
> 
> Richard A. Rhodes
> Department of Linguistics
> 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650
> University of California
> Berkeley, 94720
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 


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