From matushan at NOOS.FR Mon Jan 13 22:56:20 2003 From: matushan at NOOS.FR (Ora Matushansky) Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 23:56:20 +0100 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion Message-ID: Dear everyone, Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) (2) Declension class agreement: the declension class of the noun is reflected on the main predicate/verb. (3) Declension class concord: the declension class of the head noun is reflected on the modifying adjectives, the article, the possessor, the demonstrative... NB: In order not to confuse declension class (grouping that determines how Case markings sound) with gender (noun class, I would guess it's the grouping that determines the pronoun, or?), I would rather ask for data from languages that have both (e.g. Latin, Russian - which don't have any of the above) Any other proposals for features that do not/may not trigger agreement or concord? And finally, are Case and definiteness ever involved in suppletion (as far as I can recall from Carson's email, possessives do)? Many thanks in advance, O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From rnoyer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU Tue Jan 14 20:02:40 2003 From: rnoyer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU (Rolf Noyer) Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 12:02:40 -0800 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: In response to Ora's question -- this may be a silly answer -- but, as far as I understand the term "declension class" the phenomena mentioned in (2) and (3) below are impossible *by definition.* The difference between declension class and gender -- as I understand these terms -- is simply that declension class features do not propagate syntactically, while gender features do (or may). In other words, if a declension class property showed the kind of agreement/concord relations mentioned in (2) and (3) we would then call it a "gender" property. (Aronoff has made this definitional difference explicit in various places.) Did you have in mind some other definition of declension class? Rolf >Dear everyone, > >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > >(2) Declension class agreement: the declension class of the noun is >reflected on the main predicate/verb. > >(3) Declension class concord: the declension class of the head noun is >reflected on the modifying adjectives, the article, the possessor, the >demonstrative... > >NB: In order not to confuse declension class (grouping that determines how >Case markings sound) with gender (noun class, I would guess it's the >grouping that determines the pronoun, or?), I would rather ask for data >from languages that have both (e.g. Latin, Russian - which don't have any >of the above) > >Any other proposals for features that do not/may not trigger agreement or >concord? > >And finally, are Case and definiteness ever involved in suppletion (as far >as I can recall from Carson's email, possessives do)? > >Many thanks in advance, > >O >Ora Matushansky > >CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) >email: matushan at noos.fr >page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Tue Jan 14 19:57:06 2003 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 14:57:06 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Dear Ora: At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) For whatever it's worth, Hungarian object agreement is described in this way (though with complexities). References include work by Szabolcsi, e.g., in Kiefer & E. Kiss, 1994, Syntactic Struct of H; Synt/Sem 27, Academic Press. See H. Bartos, in U Penn Working Papers 4.2 (1997) for important critique of this position, and an alternative. I'd be interested in a summary of responses, if you are getting responses off-list as well. Best, -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik Department of Linguistics McGill University 1085 Dr. Penfield Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 CANADA tel: (514) 398-4224 fax: (514) 398-7088 http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik From bowern at FAS.HARVARD.EDU Wed Jan 15 16:28:11 2003 From: bowern at FAS.HARVARD.EDU (Claire Bowern) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:28:11 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: > >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: > >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the > >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on > >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > Many Bantu languages have object agreement that work this way too (e.g. Swahili, Zulu and Ndebele). Subject agreement is obligatory though. I remember Johanna Nichols giving a paper at the LSA a few years ago about the evolution of head marking in one of the Caucasian languages she works on (sorry I can't be more specific - I want to say Chechen but I didn't think Chechen did this since it already had agreement) where definiteness was involved in subject agreement. Claire ----------------------------- Department of Linguistics Harvard University 305 Boylston Hall Cambridge, MA, 02138 From matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU Wed Jan 15 21:56:04 2003 From: matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU (Ora Matushansky) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 16:56:04 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion Message-ID: Dear Rolf, Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension class" this way: (a) it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...) (b) it lumps declension class together with other accidentally non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or declension class (c) it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation (even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine "real-world" distinctions). (d) (perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden: e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender) (e) my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with (agreeing) noun classes to be sure. I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish... O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Jan 15 21:51:51 2003 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 21:51:51 +0000 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There are many languages in which object agreement is optional but where the presence of object agreement is almost always associated with definiteness. Not only Spanish object clitic-doubling, but Yagua object agreement/clitics, Wari, and some facets of Arawan (a family) object agreement (gender agreement is with the topic, which is definite. The proviso is that Topic must be either subject or object). The Spanish ( Porteno especially) case is a well-known example of course (there is an interesting treatment of this in Givon's syntax, for those who would like to read about some other than Kayne's Generalization and clitic-doubling). I have discussions of several of these in my _Why there are no clitics_ and there is a discussion of the Wari' facts in the Everett and Kern grammar. -- Dan Everett On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 07:57 PM, Jonathan David Bobaljik wrote: > Dear Ora: > > At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >> Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >> (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >> definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >> definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > > For whatever it's worth, Hungarian object agreement is described in > this way (though with complexities). References include work by > Szabolcsi, e.g., in Kiefer & E. Kiss, 1994, Syntactic Struct of H; > Synt/Sem 27, Academic Press. See H. Bartos, in U Penn Working Papers > 4.2 (1997) for important critique of this position, and an > alternative. > > I'd be interested in a summary of responses, if you are getting > responses off-list as well. > > Best, > > -Jonathan > -- > _______________________ > Jonathan David Bobaljik > Department of Linguistics > McGill University > 1085 Dr. Penfield > Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 > CANADA > > tel: (514) 398-4224 > fax: (514) 398-7088 > > http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Jan 16 02:09:13 2003 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 02:09:13 +0000 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On the connection between subject agreement, object agreement, and etc, I noticed the following generalization in my book on clitics, which, so far as I can tell, no one else has made (where the arrow represents implication): Subject clitics ---> object clitics object agreement --> subject agreement In the book I try to relate this to topicality and, to a lesser degree, definiteness. However, I also tried to derive this generalization from tree structure, calling it the 'Configurational Distance Agreement Principle'. Nowadays I am not very sanguine about any approach based on tree structure, but still it is an interesting generalization. Some ergative languages give what I consider to be (only) apparent counterexamples. Dan On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 04:28 PM, Claire Bowern wrote: >> >> At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >>> Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >>> (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >>> definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" >>> on >>> definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) >> > > Many Bantu languages have object agreement that work this way too (e.g. > Swahili, Zulu and Ndebele). Subject agreement is obligatory though. I > remember Johanna Nichols giving a paper at the LSA a few years ago > about > the evolution of head marking in one of the Caucasian languages she > works > on (sorry I can't be more specific - I want to say Chechen but I didn't > think Chechen did this since it already had agreement) where > definiteness > was involved in subject agreement. > Claire > > > ----------------------------- > Department of Linguistics > Harvard University > 305 Boylston Hall > Cambridge, MA, 02138 > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Wed Jan 15 22:19:21 2003 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 17:19:21 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Follow-up thought on the two preceding threads. For those who don't know it, an additional resource for questions of this sort is the Surrey Morphology Group, which has some useful databases (syncretism) and bibliogrpahies (e.g., on agreement) on-line at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik Department of Linguistics McGill University 1085 Dr. Penfield Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 CANADA tel: (514) 398-4224 fax: (514) 398-7088 http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Jan 15 23:20:15 2003 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 12:20:15 +1300 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030115165525.02bbeb20@hesiod> Message-ID: Hi all I don't understand Ora's point (a) below. I think Rolf is right: declension class is *by definition* something that isn't involved in agreement (though see below for a little further comment). This definition in no way entails that gender and declension class cannot coexist in the same language; they do in Latin, Russian and many other languages, as Ora rightly says. I think some confusion may arise through a tendency I've noticed (an unfortunate one, I think) to treat declension class membership as if it were a morphosyntactic feature, just like gender, number, definiteness, etc. Yet declension class is not morpho*syntactic*, but purely morphological: it belongs to 'morphology by itself' (if I dare use that phrase to a DM audience!). My 'little further comment' concerns the weak, strong and mixed 'declensions' of German adjectives: the suffix that the adjective carries depends on what suffix, if any, a preceding determiner has. This looks superficially like a sort of declensional *dis*agreement, or dissimilation. But in any case it is not 'declension class agreement', because determiners are not assignable to declension classes in German. Rather, what it shows is that there are factors other than gender that can exert a superficially gender-like syntagmatic influence on inflectional behaviour. I talk about this briefly, along with an Afrikaans and a Georgian example, in section 4.4 of my article 'Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of Contrast' in Language 70 (1994), 737-88. Best Andrew >Dear Rolf, > >Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization >is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension >class" this way: >(a) it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot >co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or >not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...) >(b) it lumps declension class together with other accidentally >non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that >gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether >a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or >declension class >(c) it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation >(even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine >"real-world" distinctions). >(d) (perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden: >e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la >mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I >don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension >class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender) >(e) my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and >conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with >(agreeing) noun classes to be sure. > >I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a >declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be >likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to >signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish... > >O >Ora Matushansky > >CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) >email: matushan at noos.fr >page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor and Head of Department Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU Sun Jan 19 01:15:05 2003 From: matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU (Ora Matushansky) Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:15:05 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all, At 12:20 PM 1/16/2003 +1300, you wrote: >I don't understand Ora's point (a) below. I think Rolf is right: >declension class is *by definition* something that isn't involved in >agreement (though see below for a little further comment). This >definition in no way entails that gender and declension class cannot >coexist in the same language; they do in Latin, Russian and many >other languages, as Ora rightly says. I should probably clarify my comment. First of all, what I said is that if the *only* difference between gender and declension class is that the latter doesn't spread syntactically (i.e. gender and declension class are two special cases of GROUP-X), then they should not appear on one noun (just as you don't expect a noun, at least an inanimate noun, to have two genders). And I think this (obviously wrong) prediction is valid for the definition given. Secondly, to say that declension class is defined as something that doesn't spread is not much more than a description of the facts. I want to know why, and that can only follow if syntactic spreading is *not* the definition. Saying that is's *something* that doesn't spread doesn't help. >I think some confusion may arise through a tendency I've noticed (an >unfortunate one, I think) to treat declension class membership as if >it were a morphosyntactic feature, just like gender, number, >definiteness, etc. Yet declension class is not morpho*syntactic*, but >purely morphological: it belongs to 'morphology by itself' (if I dare >use that phrase to a DM audience!). Which is why I don't want to confuse the two: there is something that determines which paradigm of Case endings a particular noun (or adjective) fits. It has additional interesting properties, such as (1) interaction with gender beyond the tendency to put nouns of the same gender in the same declension class (in the case of the so-called "common gender" in Russian), (2) the inability to spread syntactically, (3) no semantic connotations, and (4) the inability to be referred to by pronouns (i.e. a noun of the declension class Y will not be pronominalized by a pronoun of the class Y, though the pronoun may have some declension class). I don't know whether these characteristics always go together because they come only from two languages, Latin and Russian, where both gender and declension class exist and so there's no fear of confusion. >My 'little further comment' concerns the weak, strong and mixed >'declensions' of German adjectives: the suffix that the adjective >carries depends on what suffix, if any, a preceding determiner has. >This looks superficially like a sort of declensional *dis*agreement, >or dissimilation. But in any case it is not 'declension class >agreement', because determiners are not assignable to declension >classes in German. Rather, what it shows is that there are factors >other than gender that can exert a superficially gender-like >syntagmatic influence on inflectional behaviour. I talk about this >briefly, along with an Afrikaans and a Georgian example, in section >4.4 of my article 'Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of >Contrast' in Language 70 (1994), 737-88. I'm sure you know that there's also a paper by Philippe Schlenker on the topic of German adjectives and Case marking, with a different analysis: "La Flexion de l'adjectif en allemand: la morphologie de haut en bas" (in French), Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, 28, 1999 O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Jan 22 02:40:06 2003 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 15:40:06 +1300 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030118190511.02bdc7a8@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Hello all I'd like to follow up on a point that Ora Matushansky makes in her second posting on this topic, on 18 January. I think part of our disagreement is terminological, so not really interesting. For me, to define 'declension class' as something that doesn't spread does not preclude inquiry into *why* it doesn't spread -- that is, it doesn't preclude inquiry into why declension class systems (so defined) exist, alongside gender systems. We are all (I take it) interested in that 'why' question. The line of inquiry that I've pursued for some years involves exploring to what extent seemingly arbitrary inflectional complexity can be related to Eve Clark's Principle of Contrast. Can it be shown that, whenever a language has three distinct genitive singular suffixes (say), they are *all* associated with some clearly identifiable difference in information content? The information content in question may be extragrammatical (e.g. animate vs inanimate; V-final stem vs C-final stem) or extramorphological ('masculine' vs 'feminine', where these are arbitrary gender labels) or even intramorphological (e.g. *unambiguous* indication of the affixal inflectional behaviour of the noun in question in all grammatical contexts, i.e. unambigous identification of its affixal declension class)? Conceivably, the answer is 'no'. But I think the evidence so far is promising. What sort of difference in information content will suffice, for 'Contrast' purposes? Almost anything, it seems, provided it is clearcut. Consider -im and -em as masculine accusative singular endings in Latin. Once upon a time the -i- clearly belonged to the stem, so there was really only ending here. When the stem-affix boundary became blurred through phonological changes, -im disappeared entirely for many speakers, it seems. But for some speakers it was retained productively in just one context: names of rivers. Is there any point in having a distinct acc.sg. ending for river names? Hardly! But that association was good enough to ensure that -im and -em differed in information content. (This oversimplifies slightly, but see my chapter in _Papers from the 6th ICHL_, ed. J. Fisiak, 1985.) Or consider -e and -u as locative (or prepositional) singular suffixes in Russian and Polish masculine nouns. Once upon a time, again, this difference belonged to the stem rather than the suffix: o-stems vs u-stems. But again the stem-affix boundary got blurred. So what happened? Russian and Polish have both retained both suffixes, but differentiate them informationally in completely different ways. In Russian, for those nouns where -u is available, it is used only in the context of prepositions with spatial meanings, while -e is used elsewhere (_v lesu, v sadu_ 'in the forest, in the garden' versus _o lese, o sade_ 'concerning the forest/the garden'). (Ora will correct me if I've got this wrong, I'm sure!) In Polish, by contrast, -e is used with those masculine nouns that make available a different stem alternant for the locative from the one used elsewhere in the singular, while -u is used with those nouns that don't. Which nouns make available this special locative stem alternant is another story: it is partly but not wholly predictable on the basis of stem phonology. But, so far as the -e/-u choice in the locative singular goes, the generalisation that I've made is exceptionless (so far as I can discover). So -u means just 'locative singular', while -e is differentiated as meaning 'locative singular plus unusual stem alternant'. (More on this in NLLT 2000, in an article by Thea Cameron-Faulkner and me.) One can easily envisage that human brains might have been built so as to avoid encoding distinctions that are pointless both communicatively and from the point of view of the mental representation of experience. But that's not how brains are, it seems. They handle pointless distinctions with ease, provided that these distinctions are sufficiently clearcut. Thanks, Ora, for the details of the paper by Schlenker, which I will pursue. Andrew -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor and Head of Department Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From matushan at NOOS.FR Mon Jan 13 22:56:20 2003 From: matushan at NOOS.FR (Ora Matushansky) Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 23:56:20 +0100 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion Message-ID: Dear everyone, Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) (2) Declension class agreement: the declension class of the noun is reflected on the main predicate/verb. (3) Declension class concord: the declension class of the head noun is reflected on the modifying adjectives, the article, the possessor, the demonstrative... NB: In order not to confuse declension class (grouping that determines how Case markings sound) with gender (noun class, I would guess it's the grouping that determines the pronoun, or?), I would rather ask for data from languages that have both (e.g. Latin, Russian - which don't have any of the above) Any other proposals for features that do not/may not trigger agreement or concord? And finally, are Case and definiteness ever involved in suppletion (as far as I can recall from Carson's email, possessives do)? Many thanks in advance, O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From rnoyer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU Tue Jan 14 20:02:40 2003 From: rnoyer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU (Rolf Noyer) Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 12:02:40 -0800 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: In response to Ora's question -- this may be a silly answer -- but, as far as I understand the term "declension class" the phenomena mentioned in (2) and (3) below are impossible *by definition.* The difference between declension class and gender -- as I understand these terms -- is simply that declension class features do not propagate syntactically, while gender features do (or may). In other words, if a declension class property showed the kind of agreement/concord relations mentioned in (2) and (3) we would then call it a "gender" property. (Aronoff has made this definitional difference explicit in various places.) Did you have in mind some other definition of declension class? Rolf >Dear everyone, > >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > >(2) Declension class agreement: the declension class of the noun is >reflected on the main predicate/verb. > >(3) Declension class concord: the declension class of the head noun is >reflected on the modifying adjectives, the article, the possessor, the >demonstrative... > >NB: In order not to confuse declension class (grouping that determines how >Case markings sound) with gender (noun class, I would guess it's the >grouping that determines the pronoun, or?), I would rather ask for data >from languages that have both (e.g. Latin, Russian - which don't have any >of the above) > >Any other proposals for features that do not/may not trigger agreement or >concord? > >And finally, are Case and definiteness ever involved in suppletion (as far >as I can recall from Carson's email, possessives do)? > >Many thanks in advance, > >O >Ora Matushansky > >CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) >email: matushan at noos.fr >page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Tue Jan 14 19:57:06 2003 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 14:57:06 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Dear Ora: At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) For whatever it's worth, Hungarian object agreement is described in this way (though with complexities). References include work by Szabolcsi, e.g., in Kiefer & E. Kiss, 1994, Syntactic Struct of H; Synt/Sem 27, Academic Press. See H. Bartos, in U Penn Working Papers 4.2 (1997) for important critique of this position, and an alternative. I'd be interested in a summary of responses, if you are getting responses off-list as well. Best, -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik Department of Linguistics McGill University 1085 Dr. Penfield Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 CANADA tel: (514) 398-4224 fax: (514) 398-7088 http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik From bowern at FAS.HARVARD.EDU Wed Jan 15 16:28:11 2003 From: bowern at FAS.HARVARD.EDU (Claire Bowern) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 11:28:11 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: > >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: > >(1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the > >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on > >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > Many Bantu languages have object agreement that work this way too (e.g. Swahili, Zulu and Ndebele). Subject agreement is obligatory though. I remember Johanna Nichols giving a paper at the LSA a few years ago about the evolution of head marking in one of the Caucasian languages she works on (sorry I can't be more specific - I want to say Chechen but I didn't think Chechen did this since it already had agreement) where definiteness was involved in subject agreement. Claire ----------------------------- Department of Linguistics Harvard University 305 Boylston Hall Cambridge, MA, 02138 From matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU Wed Jan 15 21:56:04 2003 From: matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU (Ora Matushansky) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 16:56:04 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion Message-ID: Dear Rolf, Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension class" this way: (a) it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...) (b) it lumps declension class together with other accidentally non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or declension class (c) it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation (even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine "real-world" distinctions). (d) (perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden: e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender) (e) my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with (agreeing) noun classes to be sure. I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish... O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Jan 15 21:51:51 2003 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 21:51:51 +0000 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion, In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There are many languages in which object agreement is optional but where the presence of object agreement is almost always associated with definiteness. Not only Spanish object clitic-doubling, but Yagua object agreement/clitics, Wari, and some facets of Arawan (a family) object agreement (gender agreement is with the topic, which is definite. The proviso is that Topic must be either subject or object). The Spanish ( Porteno especially) case is a well-known example of course (there is an interesting treatment of this in Givon's syntax, for those who would like to read about some other than Kayne's Generalization and clitic-doubling). I have discussions of several of these in my _Why there are no clitics_ and there is a discussion of the Wari' facts in the Everett and Kern grammar. -- Dan Everett On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 07:57 PM, Jonathan David Bobaljik wrote: > Dear Ora: > > At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >> Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >> (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >> definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on >> definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) > > For whatever it's worth, Hungarian object agreement is described in > this way (though with complexities). References include work by > Szabolcsi, e.g., in Kiefer & E. Kiss, 1994, Syntactic Struct of H; > Synt/Sem 27, Academic Press. See H. Bartos, in U Penn Working Papers > 4.2 (1997) for important critique of this position, and an > alternative. > > I'd be interested in a summary of responses, if you are getting > responses off-list as well. > > Best, > > -Jonathan > -- > _______________________ > Jonathan David Bobaljik > Department of Linguistics > McGill University > 1085 Dr. Penfield > Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 > CANADA > > tel: (514) 398-4224 > fax: (514) 398-7088 > > http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Jan 16 02:09:13 2003 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel Everett) Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 02:09:13 +0000 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On the connection between subject agreement, object agreement, and etc, I noticed the following generalization in my book on clitics, which, so far as I can tell, no one else has made (where the arrow represents implication): Subject clitics ---> object clitics object agreement --> subject agreement In the book I try to relate this to topicality and, to a lesser degree, definiteness. However, I also tried to derive this generalization from tree structure, calling it the 'Configurational Distance Agreement Principle'. Nowadays I am not very sanguine about any approach based on tree structure, but still it is an interesting generalization. Some ergative languages give what I consider to be (only) apparent counterexamples. Dan On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 04:28 PM, Claire Bowern wrote: >> >> At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote: >>> Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible: >>> (1) Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the >>> definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" >>> on >>> definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :) >> > > Many Bantu languages have object agreement that work this way too (e.g. > Swahili, Zulu and Ndebele). Subject agreement is obligatory though. I > remember Johanna Nichols giving a paper at the LSA a few years ago > about > the evolution of head marking in one of the Caucasian languages she > works > on (sorry I can't be more specific - I want to say Chechen but I didn't > think Chechen did this since it already had agreement) where > definiteness > was involved in subject agreement. > Claire > > > ----------------------------- > Department of Linguistics > Harvard University > 305 Boylston Hall > Cambridge, MA, 02138 > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Chair of Phonetics and Phonology Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/ FAX & Department phone: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Wed Jan 15 22:19:21 2003 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 17:19:21 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030113234338.00bd51c0@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Follow-up thought on the two preceding threads. For those who don't know it, an additional resource for questions of this sort is the Surrey Morphology Group, which has some useful databases (syncretism) and bibliogrpahies (e.g., on agreement) on-line at: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik Department of Linguistics McGill University 1085 Dr. Penfield Montreal PQ H3A 1A7 CANADA tel: (514) 398-4224 fax: (514) 398-7088 http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/linguistics/faculty/bobaljik -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Jan 15 23:20:15 2003 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 12:20:15 +1300 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030115165525.02bbeb20@hesiod> Message-ID: Hi all I don't understand Ora's point (a) below. I think Rolf is right: declension class is *by definition* something that isn't involved in agreement (though see below for a little further comment). This definition in no way entails that gender and declension class cannot coexist in the same language; they do in Latin, Russian and many other languages, as Ora rightly says. I think some confusion may arise through a tendency I've noticed (an unfortunate one, I think) to treat declension class membership as if it were a morphosyntactic feature, just like gender, number, definiteness, etc. Yet declension class is not morpho*syntactic*, but purely morphological: it belongs to 'morphology by itself' (if I dare use that phrase to a DM audience!). My 'little further comment' concerns the weak, strong and mixed 'declensions' of German adjectives: the suffix that the adjective carries depends on what suffix, if any, a preceding determiner has. This looks superficially like a sort of declensional *dis*agreement, or dissimilation. But in any case it is not 'declension class agreement', because determiners are not assignable to declension classes in German. Rather, what it shows is that there are factors other than gender that can exert a superficially gender-like syntagmatic influence on inflectional behaviour. I talk about this briefly, along with an Afrikaans and a Georgian example, in section 4.4 of my article 'Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of Contrast' in Language 70 (1994), 737-88. Best Andrew >Dear Rolf, > >Thanks very much for your answer - it does suggest that the generalization >is valid. There are however some problems defining "declension >class" this way: >(a) it makes the prediction that gender and declension class cannot >co-exist (since the only difference between them is whether they spread or >not) - this prediction is wrong (cf. Latin, Russian...) >(b) it lumps declension class together with other accidentally >non-spreading features, e.g. gender in English. Conversely, if you say that >gender features may not spread, then it becomes impossible to know whether >a particular noun class distinction (in a language with Case) is gender or >declension class >(c) it ignores the fact that declension class has no semantic correlation >(even though gender is often arbitrary, it quite often connects to genuine >"real-world" distinctions). >(d) (perhaps as a subpart of (c)), declension class cannot be overridden: >e.g. masculine nouns denoting humans can be treated as feminine (cf. la >mEdico in European Spanish, moja vrach 'my-F doctor-M' in Russian), but I >don't think it's ever possible to put a noun in a different declension >class (unless such a switch is entailed by the switch in natural gender) >(e) my guess is that genders cannot be unproductive, while declension and >conjugation classes can - but I don't know enough about languages with >(agreeing) noun classes to be sure. > >I don't have a precise definition in mind, but my impression is that a >declension class is so much more a property of a noun stem that it may be >likened to the verbal theme suffixes... though these latter can be used to >signal a switch to subjunctive in Spanish... > >O >Ora Matushansky > >CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) >email: matushan at noos.fr >page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor and Head of Department Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU Sun Jan 19 01:15:05 2003 From: matushan at ALUM.MIT.EDU (Ora Matushansky) Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:15:05 -0500 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all, At 12:20 PM 1/16/2003 +1300, you wrote: >I don't understand Ora's point (a) below. I think Rolf is right: >declension class is *by definition* something that isn't involved in >agreement (though see below for a little further comment). This >definition in no way entails that gender and declension class cannot >coexist in the same language; they do in Latin, Russian and many >other languages, as Ora rightly says. I should probably clarify my comment. First of all, what I said is that if the *only* difference between gender and declension class is that the latter doesn't spread syntactically (i.e. gender and declension class are two special cases of GROUP-X), then they should not appear on one noun (just as you don't expect a noun, at least an inanimate noun, to have two genders). And I think this (obviously wrong) prediction is valid for the definition given. Secondly, to say that declension class is defined as something that doesn't spread is not much more than a description of the facts. I want to know why, and that can only follow if syntactic spreading is *not* the definition. Saying that is's *something* that doesn't spread doesn't help. >I think some confusion may arise through a tendency I've noticed (an >unfortunate one, I think) to treat declension class membership as if >it were a morphosyntactic feature, just like gender, number, >definiteness, etc. Yet declension class is not morpho*syntactic*, but >purely morphological: it belongs to 'morphology by itself' (if I dare >use that phrase to a DM audience!). Which is why I don't want to confuse the two: there is something that determines which paradigm of Case endings a particular noun (or adjective) fits. It has additional interesting properties, such as (1) interaction with gender beyond the tendency to put nouns of the same gender in the same declension class (in the case of the so-called "common gender" in Russian), (2) the inability to spread syntactically, (3) no semantic connotations, and (4) the inability to be referred to by pronouns (i.e. a noun of the declension class Y will not be pronominalized by a pronoun of the class Y, though the pronoun may have some declension class). I don't know whether these characteristics always go together because they come only from two languages, Latin and Russian, where both gender and declension class exist and so there's no fear of confusion. >My 'little further comment' concerns the weak, strong and mixed >'declensions' of German adjectives: the suffix that the adjective >carries depends on what suffix, if any, a preceding determiner has. >This looks superficially like a sort of declensional *dis*agreement, >or dissimilation. But in any case it is not 'declension class >agreement', because determiners are not assignable to declension >classes in German. Rather, what it shows is that there are factors >other than gender that can exert a superficially gender-like >syntagmatic influence on inflectional behaviour. I talk about this >briefly, along with an Afrikaans and a Georgian example, in section >4.4 of my article 'Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of >Contrast' in Language 70 (1994), 737-88. I'm sure you know that there's also a paper by Philippe Schlenker on the topic of German adjectives and Case marking, with a different analysis: "La Flexion de l'adjectif en allemand: la morphologie de haut en bas" (in French), Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes, 28, 1999 O Ora Matushansky CNRS - UMR 7023 (Paris 8) email: matushan at noos.fr page web: http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/ From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Jan 22 02:40:06 2003 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 15:40:06 +1300 Subject: concord, agreement and suppletion In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.2.20030118190511.02bdc7a8@pop.noos.fr> Message-ID: Hello all I'd like to follow up on a point that Ora Matushansky makes in her second posting on this topic, on 18 January. I think part of our disagreement is terminological, so not really interesting. For me, to define 'declension class' as something that doesn't spread does not preclude inquiry into *why* it doesn't spread -- that is, it doesn't preclude inquiry into why declension class systems (so defined) exist, alongside gender systems. We are all (I take it) interested in that 'why' question. The line of inquiry that I've pursued for some years involves exploring to what extent seemingly arbitrary inflectional complexity can be related to Eve Clark's Principle of Contrast. Can it be shown that, whenever a language has three distinct genitive singular suffixes (say), they are *all* associated with some clearly identifiable difference in information content? The information content in question may be extragrammatical (e.g. animate vs inanimate; V-final stem vs C-final stem) or extramorphological ('masculine' vs 'feminine', where these are arbitrary gender labels) or even intramorphological (e.g. *unambiguous* indication of the affixal inflectional behaviour of the noun in question in all grammatical contexts, i.e. unambigous identification of its affixal declension class)? Conceivably, the answer is 'no'. But I think the evidence so far is promising. What sort of difference in information content will suffice, for 'Contrast' purposes? Almost anything, it seems, provided it is clearcut. Consider -im and -em as masculine accusative singular endings in Latin. Once upon a time the -i- clearly belonged to the stem, so there was really only ending here. When the stem-affix boundary became blurred through phonological changes, -im disappeared entirely for many speakers, it seems. But for some speakers it was retained productively in just one context: names of rivers. Is there any point in having a distinct acc.sg. ending for river names? Hardly! But that association was good enough to ensure that -im and -em differed in information content. (This oversimplifies slightly, but see my chapter in _Papers from the 6th ICHL_, ed. J. Fisiak, 1985.) Or consider -e and -u as locative (or prepositional) singular suffixes in Russian and Polish masculine nouns. Once upon a time, again, this difference belonged to the stem rather than the suffix: o-stems vs u-stems. But again the stem-affix boundary got blurred. So what happened? Russian and Polish have both retained both suffixes, but differentiate them informationally in completely different ways. In Russian, for those nouns where -u is available, it is used only in the context of prepositions with spatial meanings, while -e is used elsewhere (_v lesu, v sadu_ 'in the forest, in the garden' versus _o lese, o sade_ 'concerning the forest/the garden'). (Ora will correct me if I've got this wrong, I'm sure!) In Polish, by contrast, -e is used with those masculine nouns that make available a different stem alternant for the locative from the one used elsewhere in the singular, while -u is used with those nouns that don't. Which nouns make available this special locative stem alternant is another story: it is partly but not wholly predictable on the basis of stem phonology. But, so far as the -e/-u choice in the locative singular goes, the generalisation that I've made is exceptionless (so far as I can discover). So -u means just 'locative singular', while -e is differentiated as meaning 'locative singular plus unusual stem alternant'. (More on this in NLLT 2000, in an article by Thea Cameron-Faulkner and me.) One can easily envisage that human brains might have been built so as to avoid encoding distinctions that are pointless both communicatively and from the point of view of the mental representation of experience. But that's not how brains are, it seems. They handle pointless distinctions with ease, provided that these distinctions are sufficiently clearcut. Thanks, Ora, for the details of the paper by Schlenker, which I will pursue. Andrew -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor and Head of Department Department of Linguistics, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html