From dp11 at CORNELL.EDU Sun Feb 1 20:15:11 1998 From: dp11 at CORNELL.EDU (David Parkinson) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 16:15:11 -0400 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Hi Funknetters: Some of us here at Cornell are having a seminar on ergativity, and the question came up about whether anyone has ever carried out research to see whether ergativity correlates with any other aspects of linguistic structure (word order, head vs. dependent marking, presence of antipassive). Something like Dryer's or Nichols' research would be nice, but even something on a less sweeping scale. Anyone know of anything like this? There are reports in the literature such as "ergative" languages tending to have verb-initial or verb-final order, but has this ever been rigorously tested? Also, does anyone know if there has been work done on the somewhat strange status of ergativity vis-a-vis accusativity? For example, it is often said that while languages exist whose sole means of marking grammatical relations is accusative patterning, no language exists whose sole means is ergative patterning. Also, what are unified subject properties in "accusative" languages often split in "ergative" languages between grammatical subject (i.e., final 1, uniting Dixon's S and A: e.g., reflexive antecedence, equi deletion) and absolutive case (uniting Dixon's S and O: e.g., relative extraction). It may be accusativocentric to see the split from the point of view of a unified category in "accusative" languages, where it may be more appropriate to see them as a collection of properties which coincide in "accusative" languages and split for principled reasons in "ergative" languages (i.e., Manning 1996). But why should a language not exhibit ergative properties everywhere? And why should subject properties split in the way they do? Any help appreciated. David Parkinson dp11 at cornell.edu P.S. I am using scare quotes on the terms "ergative" and "accusative" language, since it is often a misnomer to identify a language as one or the other. From bates at CRL.UCSD.EDU Sun Feb 1 21:24:13 1998 From: bates at CRL.UCSD.EDU (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 13:24:13 -0800 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Michael Silverstein at the University of Chicago did quite a big of work on the ergative/accusative continuum back in the 1970's that might be useful to your inquiry, if you aren't already familiar with it. -liz bates From clements at INDIANA.EDU Mon Feb 2 01:21:47 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 20:21:47 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, David Parkinson wrote: > Some of us here at Cornell are having a seminar on ergativity, and > the question came up about whether anyone has ever carried out research to > see whether ergativity correlates with any other aspects of linguistic > structure (word order, head vs. dependent marking, presence of > antipassive). Something like Dryer's or Nichols' research would be nice, > but even something on a less sweeping scale. Anyone know of anything like > this? There are reports in the literature such as "ergative" languages > tending to have verb-initial or verb-final order, but has this ever been > rigorously tested? Dryer's 1986 "primary objects, secondary objects, and antidative" (Language 62:808-45) is really good, I think. A side note about the correlation between discourse and ergative-type marking: In Spanish, there are what I call "ergativity effects". For example, the default order of intransitive clause subjects and transitive clause direct objects is postverbal. It turns out that this is grounded in discourse: topics are preverbal, focus elements are postverbal. It could be that discourse considerations underlie ergative marking in other languages as well. I'd be glad to give you a reference if you're interested. Clancy Clements From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Feb 2 02:30:26 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 21:30:26 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > In Spanish, there are what I call "ergativity effects". For example, the > default order of intransitive clause subjects and transitive clause > direct objects is postverbal. It turns out that this is grounded in > discourse: topics are preverbal, focus elements are postverbal. It could I'm not sure that I would call the Spanish phenomenon you describe "ergativity effects". Spanish intransitive subjects are more often than not topics and not foci. And when they are foci they can also be preverbal (F1 position) as well as postverbal (F2 position) or rheme-final (F3 position) (the same thing applies to transitive subjects). It is true that overt intransitive subjects are about as often foci as they are topics and thus there is a high percentage of overt intransitive subjects that are postverbal, especially with some intransitive subject arguments with certain semantic characteristics ("roles"). Ergative subjects can also be foci, just less frequently than absolutive subjects. This is for two reasons: 1) objects are typically better focus candidates than (transitive) subjects; and 2) transitive propositions make poor thetic (topicless) assertions. Thus most transitive subjects that are foci are "contrastive foci" and not "new foci". I am sure that you are aware of this complexity, but I am afraid that simplifying this picture by saying that Spanish displays "ergativity effects" may lead to more confusion than illumination. Going back to the original question, correlations between grammatical categories and other properties of language can be found by looking at the functional source of the grammatical categories and then seeing what those functional properties correlate with and why. In other words, we must look at the non-grammatical source of grammatical categories in semantics and, especially, information structure (discourse pragmatics). As many have argued before, I believe that the category subject, or nominative, is a grammaticalization of the ubiquitous informational category topic. Transitive and intransitive subjects are the default topics for a predicate (most topical arguments in the abstract). The category absolutive, on the other hand is not as well motivated a category. Overt (full nominal) objects are often foci, but not so highly accessible ones (unless they are contrastive). And overt intransitive subjects are foci about half of the time and topics the other half. Then, of course, there are the semantic affinities between O's and S's, most clearly evidenced in causativization and anti-causativization constructions, for instance (e.g. transitive vs. intransitive "boil"), in which the S of the non-causative predicate is the O of the causative version. So how and why do the absolutive and ergative categories arise? It seems that it happens by the reinterpretation of certain constructions in which a "patient" acts as an S (e.g. passive constructions). Such constructions are then reanalyzed, presumably to take advantage of the newly acquired argument coding morphology (cf. e.g. Myhill 1992, Typological discourse analysis). This is probably also facilitated by the informational and semantic (weak) correlations, or affinities, between S and O arguments. >>From this picture we can ascertain, or begin to look for, correlations between grammaticalized ergative and absolutive categories and other characteristics of a language. For instance, we may ask: what kind of languages use passive constructions and in what contexts? Is seems that rigid word order languages often use passives, since languages with free word order achieve the same effects by simply rearranging the topic and focus arguments. And passives are often used with perfective aspect, since in such assertions the topicality of the patient is increased and thus patients are more likely to be the topic of the assertion (note, however, that passive can also be used in a language such as English to place a patient in F1 (preverbal) focus position, whereas a more flexible order language, such as Spanish would just place the object in F1 position without changing its grammatical relation or the basic construction. Anyway, I'm getting carried away again. Sorry about that. I just wanted to clear up some potential misunderstandings. Jon From Valerie.Ross at COLORADO.EDU Mon Feb 2 03:43:06 1998 From: Valerie.Ross at COLORADO.EDU (ROSS VALERIE SUZANNE) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 20:43:06 -0700 Subject: E-Mail list Message-ID: Could you please take me off of your e-mail list. I do not know how I even began receicving mail from you when I did not sign up asking for information. I would appreciate it if you would erase my name so I stop receiving your mail. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Mon Feb 2 08:01:49 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 10:01:49 +0200 Subject: ergativity arising Message-ID: I am vaguely developing a theory about ergativity and word order based on observations from Austronesian languages (though I'm aware of the (correct) typological observations about ergativity being associated with verb-final and verb-initial order. As I think most of you functionalists know, the Austronesian languages as a group sort of hover between ergativity and accusativity, with some more in one direction, others more in the other direction, and others who knows where in between. Basically, they (all?) have some kind of construction with ergative/passive morphology (e.g. direct object like intransitive subject, transitive subject different but occurring much more frequently than, e.g. the English passive. In some Austronesian languages, this `ergative-passive' construction is statistically preponderant, and these languages are popularly considered `ergative' (e.g. Samoan, and I think it's acceptable to analyze Philippine languages like Tagalog this way these days, e.g. Cooreman Fox & Givon in Studies in Language 1988 I think it was), while in others the `ergative-passive' construction is much less common. It turns out that in Javanese, the ergative-passive construction (with the prefix di-) occurs about 25% of the time (see my article in SIL), while in Indonesian the cognate construction occurs about 40% of the time, while in Cebuano the `goal focus' ergative-passive construction occurs about 50% of the time and in Tagalog it's about 67% of the time (I think I'm remembering these numbers about right--Matt Shibatani reported the last two, if I remember correctly). This correlates with the degree of word-order flexibility in these languages. Javanese is the most strongly Actor-Verb-Patient (SVO if you want to use these terms, but they aren't appropriate)--the `ergative-passive' construction in Javanese HAS TO be Patient-Verb, like a more normal English-type passive construction. On the other hand, Indonesian is more flexible--the Patient in the ergative-passive construction can go either before or after the verb (and is usually after), and it is comparatively more common than in Javanese. On the other hand, Indonesian CANNOT normally have both the Agent AND the Patient after the verb in this construction (actually I have found a single example of this, but this is out of several hundred tokens)--so Indonesian word order is still restricted. On the other hand, Tagalog and Cebuano freely allow Verb-Agent-Patient or Verb-Patient-Agent constructions with their ergative-passive construction, which is correspondingly much more common. So, what this means is that as we go from the verb-medial Javanese to the generally verb-initial Philippine languages, the frequency of the ergative-passive construction goes up and up and the language gets `more ergative.' For example, there are di-constructions in Indonesian with postverbal patients which could not be translated into Javanese with the di-construction but rather has to use the `active' construction. Here's a clear pair: INDONESIAN Dengan sigap disambarnya kayu ela... with quick seize yardstick `Quickly, he seized a yardstick...' (Suman 1978:161) JAVANESE Gage wae deweke ndudut kacune... quickly she pull-out her-handkerchief `Quickly, she pulled out her handkerchief...' (Brata 1979:167-8) In both languages, the di- construction is normally used for temporally sequenced transitive verbs (I think Paul Hopper first made this observation about Indonesian), and in both languages the Patient can only go before the verb if it has some special discourse salience. But since Javanese does not allow postverbal Patients in the di- construction, this means that if the Patient does not have any special discourse salience, the di- construction cannot be used, even if the clause is temporally sequenced--neither `kayu ela' nor `kayune' have any special discourse salience and so must be postverbal, but this does not stop Indonesian from using its di- (passive-ergative) construction, which can take a postverbal patient, but this DOES stop Javanese from using ITS di- construction, which CANNOT take a postverbal patient. This clearly shows how word order is related to the frequency of a passive-ergative construction. And I bet we could find similar pairs in Indonesian as opposed to Tagalog, where the passive-ergative construction can only be used in Tagalog because it has even more word order flexibility than Indonesian. This suggests that ergativity arises (in some situations) as a verb-medial language gets more flexible verb-initial order, or, correspondingly, an ergative VSO/VOS language can becomes nominative-accusative as it switches to more rigid SVO order. John Myhill From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 3 02:23:22 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 21:23:22 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: <199802020231.SAA14036@iceland.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > I'm not sure that I would call the Spanish phenomenon you describe > "ergativity effects". Spanish intransitive subjects are more often than not > topics and not foci. And when they are foci they can also be preverbal (F1 > position) as well as postverbal (F2 position) or rheme-final (F3 position) > (the same thing applies to transitive subjects). It is true that overt > intransitive subjects are about as often foci as they are topics and thus > there is a high percentage of overt intransitive subjects that are > postverbal, especially with some intransitive subject arguments with certain > semantic characteristics ("roles"). At least one test I know of may suggest that there is a certain ergative-like effect in the distribution of subjects in Spanish. Bare plural subjects can only appear as foci, never as topics. So, of all the possible candidates for subjects, all can appear postverbally, but not all preverbally. Casielles, in the 1996 LSRL selected papers volume (ed. Claudia Parodi et al.), talks about this within a formal semantics framework. And of course, the default position for objects is immediately after the verb. However, Jon Aske is right in saying that the term "ergative effect" is a simplification of a complex phenomenon in Spanish. The point is, however, that discourse considerations account for this ergative-like distribution of subjects in Spanish, though stricto senso we don't have a case of bona fide ergative-absolutive marking here. BUT in the marking of DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. Clancy Clements Indiana U. From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Feb 3 03:39:05 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 22:39:05 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clancy, I'm not sure I follow you here. > At least one test I know of may suggest that there is a certain > ergative-like effect in the distribution of subjects in Spanish. Bare > plural subjects can only appear as foci, never as topics. So, of all the > possible candidates for subjects, all can appear postverbally, but not all > preverbally. Sure, some ideas make very poor topic candidates (those that are very low in topicality, such as non-referential ones). On the other hand, all ideas can be the focus of an assertion in some context or another. I'm not sure of what this has to do with ergativity. Transitive subjects can be foci too, though less often than absolutive subjects, and for a variety of reasons, but not because they are A's as opposed to S's, i.e. not because of their grammatical category. Grammatical relations/categories really cannot explain anything. > BUT in the marking of > DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object > marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer > (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive > marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. Perhaps you could give us some examples and what it is that you interpret as being analogous to ergative-absolutive marking in the Spanish pronominal system. I am familiar with Dryer's paper, although I have more than a few problems with it, and Matthew probably does too now, but I'm not sure I see how it applies to this case. If there is no general interest in this topic I'll be happy to continue this conversation in private. I just learned that there are over 800 people out there lurking who may be bored by all this. Best, Jon ________________________ Jon Aske - aske at earthlink.net Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 From annes at HTDC.ORG Tue Feb 3 08:08:55 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 22:08:55 -1000 Subject: NLP and Syntax in the Classroom Message-ID: Since the original announcement of the availability of "BracketDoctor" to generate trees and labeled brackets in the style of Linguistic Data Consortium's Penn Treebank II guidelines, there have already been requests by several professors and students about the use of the software in the classroom. This is certainly allowable and I would like to offer my services as a consultant to those who would like to use the BracketDoctor as a classroom tool. I am willing to serve as a clearing house for materials and to provide commentary as to what does and does not work and what the reason for it is. I can also implement improvements in the parser as gaps or errors become apparent. Because the development of this software has been done through private investment and it is currently proprietary and patent pending, I cannot reveal the source code or the exact nature of the linguistic theory that is being used, but I can provide general discussion of the Penn Treebank guidelines and of theoretical syntax and English syntax. If this becomes popular, we can provide a shared space for handouts, problems, discussions and so on on our server. If there were sufficient interest we could also set up an email discussion list. Of course, this might also provide invaluable contact with students and professors at other universities. The only requirement for group use is that each member of the class or group download his own copy of the software. The license that is part of the standard set up is written only for single users, so rather than copying it from someone, it is necessary to download it from our web site or get it by email from me. There are also those who have begun to speculate on possible improvements to current NLP devices using the underlying technology. We definitely support such speculation and would encourage you to talk to us about such possibilities. However, please be advised that this is a copyrighted product and the parser that underlies it is patent pending. You cannot make such developments on your own without a license from us. Such licenses will be easy or difficult to obtain depending on the commercial viability of the project being described, the relative role of the parsing technology in the overall value of the project, and the intended uses. In addition to the obvious enhancements to database and Internet searching, web site assistance, and dialoging with game characters, one of the most common comments about possible new products is that this will likely increase the number of possible commands in speech rec systems from a set of a few hundred to thousands. This is because exponential growth, which for years was a problem for NLP actually works in our favor where it is possible to ask for a file (and hundreds of other things) in these and more combinations. (could/would/can/will you) (please) open/get/find/grab/take (me) the file/document/doohickey called/named//which/that is called/ named//which/that/0 I named/called manual.doc or send/mail/email Bob a message/email/letter/memo/fax (that/which says) saying, "meeting at five" Thus, the fact that this parsing system allows all the above variations for all possible commands leads to an exponential growth in the number of possible commands to allow thousands of possibilities over a few dozen commands that are currently allowed while only requiring an increase in vocabulary of a few hundred to a few thousand words. Of course, the real advantage though is that this makes it possible for users of speech rec technologies to do command and control without the need to refer to a list of fixed commands. The user can just speak as though he were talking to a friend or a neighbor. Thus, for students working on projects in syntax or for students looking to design projects in NLP, the BracketDoctor can be a very useful tool, and we would like to encourage professors and students alike to contact us for support, discussion, and commentary. For those of you who have not received the BracketDoctor executable, it is available for download at http://www.ergo-ling.com or by sending an email request to me at bralich at hawaii.edu. To save on bandwidth let me remind you that discussion of this matter beyond this invitation may not be appropriate for the entire list, so rather than just hitting the "reply" button, please respond to me directly at "bralich at hawaii.edu." Sincerely, Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)5393924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Tue Feb 3 17:38:03 1998 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 12:38:03 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Anna Sierwierska had a paper on the relationship between word order type and ergative case marking in STUF (Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung) in 1996. As for ergative-patterning word order, I discuss cases of this in "On the six-way word order typology" in Studies in Language in 1997. In some of these cases, the word order is pragmatically determined, the pragmatic factors leading to a statistical pattern that is ergative. But it is also important to distinguish ergative-patterning word order from split intransitive patterning word order, where the position of subjects relative to the verb is pragmatically governed in such a way that there are major differences among particular intransitive verbs that also correlate with their semantics, where it is particularly common for the subjects of certain intransitive verbs to occur in a position normally associated with objects. This is apparently true of many European languages. Matthew Dryer From cmanning at SULTRY.ARTS.USYD.EDU.AU Wed Feb 4 22:19:28 1998 From: cmanning at SULTRY.ARTS.USYD.EDU.AU (Christopher D. Manning) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 09:19:28 +1100 Subject: ergativity arising Message-ID: On 2 February 1998, John Myhill wrote: > I am vaguely developing a theory about ergativity and word order based > on observations from Austronesian languages > Basically, they (all?) > have some kind of construction with ergative/passive morphology (e.g. > direct object like intransitive subject, transitive subject different but > occurring > much more frequently than, e.g. the English passive. > For > example, there are di-constructions in Indonesian with postverbal patients > which could not be translated into Javanese with the di-construction but > rather has to use the `active' construction. Here's a clear pair: > > INDONESIAN > Dengan sigap disambarnya kayu ela... > with quick seize yardstick > `Quickly, he seized a yardstick...' > (Suman 1978:161) > > JAVANESE > Gage wae deweke ndudut kacune... > quickly she pull-out her-handkerchief > `Quickly, she pulled out her handkerchief...' > (Brata 1979:167-8) I found John's discussion (omitted) really interesting. But I think a problem is lumping together all uses of di- as "the di- passive-ergative construction". I suspect that the fact that some Indonesian di-constructions cannot be translated into Javanese di-constructions reflects the ambiguous status of the di-construction between passive and ergative in Indonesian. In a paper that I've been writing with I Wayan Arka, we argue that while all uses of di- license the Patient to be the surface subject, some are Passive (in the sense that the Agent becomes an oblique and transitivity is decreased by one) while others are Ergative (in the sense that the Agent remains a core argument and transitivity is unchanged -- one just sees a different linking between thematic roles and surface positions). In particular, we argue that the ones with pronominal clitic -nya are ergative not passive, and hence you get, for example, very different behaviour with reflexives: the clitic -nya can act as antecedent for a reflexive, while an oblique PP expression of an agent can't. Dirinya tidak di-perhatikan-nya self.3 NEG di-care -3 `(S)he didn't take care of self.' *Dirinya di-serahkan ke Polisi oleh Amir self.3 di-surrender to police by Amir *`Self was surrendered to Police by Amir.' I think such an understanding of the ambiguity of uses of di- in Indonesian might shed some light on the observations above. Best, Christopher Manning From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Fri Feb 6 10:08:03 1998 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 11:08:03 +0100 Subject: Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Available now on the World Wide Web: A Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics This bibliography, maintained by Michel Buijs, focusses on publications of interest to those working from a functional perspective. Publications are listed in different categories: - Clause Types A. Participial Clauses B. Subclauses - Particles - Pragmatics & Word Order - Tense/Aspect - Miscellaneous - Reference Works The address: http://wwwlet.leidenuniv.nl/www.let.data/gltc/michel/bgl.html Yours, Michel |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands Phone: +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 Fax: +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 E-mail: mbuijs at rullet.leidenuniv.nl |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Fri Feb 6 17:19:20 1998 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 11:19:20 -0600 Subject: (fwd) Call: CSDL-4 Message-ID: From: IN%"csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu" 5-FEB-1998 15:22:18.82 To: IN%"tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU" CC: Subj: Call: CSDL-4 Hi Tom, Could you forward this to the funknet list? I'd appreciate it, Alan. ----------------------------------------------- CALL FOR ABSTRACTS The Fourth Conference on CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE, AND LANGUAGE (CSDL-4) October 10-12, 1998 Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Invited speakers for theme sessions on: --> Functional and Cognitive Approaches to the Study of First Language Acquisition Nancy BUDWIG (Clark University) Michael TOMASELLO (Max Planck Inst. for Evolutionary Anthropology) third speaker -- TBA -- > Grammatical Constructions: Form and Function Joan BYBEE (University of New Mexico) Talmy GIVON (University of Oregon) Brian MACWHINNEY (Carnegie Mellon University) A special poster session on --> Discourse and Computer-Mediated Communication will be held during the conference sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). A pre-conference symposium will be held on Friday evening, October 9, on --> Primate Communication. The following invited speakers will discuss the research they are conducting at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University: Harold Gouzoules Dario Maestripieri Susan Savage-Rumbaugh. WHAT TO SUBMIT We invite papers which consider functional principles of linguistic organization, and the interaction between language and cognition. Priority will be given to papers which examine both the cognitive and discourse functions of linguistic phenomena. Specific areas of inquiry at the conference will include, but not be limited to: Lexical and grammatical meaning Conversational practice Form and function Discourse analysis Conceptual structure Iconicity in language Metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon Language change and grammaticalization Language acquisition Social interaction and grammar Sentence processing We also invite abstracts for the special poster session on Discourse and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Specific areas of inquiry at the session will include, but not be limited to: CMC as a force in linguistic and cognitive change Specialized lexical and typographic registers of CMC Emergent communication norms in CMC Discourse analysis of CMC Discourse styles in the virtual classroom and virtual communities Continuities between CMC and other discourse genres Gender differences in CMC CMC and nonlinear thinking ABSTRACTS for 20-minutes papers or the special-topic poster session may be a maximum of one page. At the top of the abstract (if by e-mail) or on a separate page (if on paper), please include title of paper author name(s) and affiliation(s) topic area (from the list above or whatever seems appropriate) e-mail address paper mailing address SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Abstracts must be received by March 16, 1998. WHERE TO SUBMIT: We STRONGLY prefer e-mail submissions. Abstracts for 20-minute papers for the main session should be e-mailed in ascii form to: . Abstracts for the poster session on Discourse and CMC should be e-mailed in ascii form to: . Please use "Abstract" as your subject header. If you are submitting more than one abstract, please e-mail each separately. If you prefer to use regular mail, send four copies of your abstract for the main conference for the poster session on session to: Discourse and CMC to: CSDL-4 Abstracts Poster session abstracts Program in Linguistics c/o Wendy Newstetter Callaway Center 312S EduTech Institute Emory University Georgia Inst. of Technology Atlanta, GA 30322, USA Atlanta, GA 30332-0280, USA INQUIRIES: For more information, visit the conference web site forthcoming in February at . e-mail inquiries: csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu Chair of the organizing committee: Alan Cienki e-mail: lanac at emory.edu phone: 404-727-2689 From clements at INDIANA.EDU Sat Feb 7 17:31:56 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 12:31:56 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: <199802030339.TAA27920@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > Sure, some ideas make very poor topic candidates (those that are very low in > topicality, such as non-referential ones). On the other hand, all ideas can > be the focus of an assertion in some context or another. I'm not sure of > what this has to do with ergativity. Transitive subjects can be foci too, > though less often than absolutive subjects, and for a variety of reasons, > but not because they are A's as opposed to S's, i.e. not because of their > grammatical category. Grammatical relations/categories really cannot > explain anything. Here is my reasoning. First, I'm assuming that frequency determines the default position in Spanish, then secondarily the distribution of different types of NPs, i.e. definite, indefinite and mass/bare plural NPs. As you pointed out, in Spanish intransitive clauses, one finds comparable distribution between pre- and post-verbal subjects. So, frequency as a criterion doesn't help. Next, if we look at the distribution of NP types in pre- and post-verbal position, we find that all types mentioned above appear postverbally, but not all types appear preverbally. This, as you point out, is discourse related. It suggests, nevertheless, that the default position for subjects in Spanish intrans. clauses is postverbal. In transitive clauses, again because of discourse reasons, the subject (which is mostly the topic) is overwhelmingly preverbal. Here frequency tells us that for Spanish transitive clauses, preverbal position is the default position for subjects. So, you find a pattern, apparent in the default position of the subject in transitive and intransitive clauses, that is suggestive of an ergative marking pattern in that trans. clause objects and intrans. clause subjects have their default position postverbally, i.e. they are marked with the same word order. Now, does this mean that Spanish is an ergative language. That's not what is being claimed. The claim is that Spanish exhibits an ergative marking pattern, even though this pattern is accounted for by discourse-related arguments. Postverbal subject word order is not grammaticalized in Spanish. Were it to become grammaticalized, then one could speak of ergativity. The reanalysis of passive marking in some languages leads to an ergative marking. There are, though, transitional stages in the process of the reanalysis. Spanish could be in a similar process with respect to the position of its subject. > > BUT in the marking of > > DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object > > marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer > > (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive > > marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. > > Perhaps you could give us some examples and what it is that you interpret as > being analogous to ergative-absolutive marking in the Spanish pronominal > system. I am familiar with Dryer's paper, although I have more than a few > problems with it, and Matthew probably does too now, but I'm not sure I see > how it applies to this case. PO marking marks monotrans. DOs and ditransitive IOs identically, just as intrans. subjects and trans. DOs are marked identically. In Spanish, you have personal "a", which disambiguates subjects from objects in monotrans. clauses. If the subject and DO share key features, personal "a" marks the DO. This disambiguation account works for almost all cases except for cases where the DO is personified, as in *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris'. In ditrans. clauses, the IO is marked with personal "a". The crucial test is in ditransitive clauses with two animate objects. Which object is marked? It's the PO, i.e. the IO, as in *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*. For pronominals, *le* marks monotrans. DOs (animate) and ditrans. IOs in a number of dialects, (Castilian, Paraguayan, Uruguayan, among others; so called LEISMO--- there's a lot more to be said because issue of gender and animacy come into play here). So, here again, you find a marking pattern suggestive of ergative marking. Clancy Clements From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Feb 8 04:40:57 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 23:40:57 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Since several people asked that we continue this chat in public rather than in private, I am back with some questions I have about Clancy's latest message to the list. On Saturday, February 07, 1998 12:32 PM J. Clancy Clements wrote: > Here is my reasoning. First, I'm assuming that frequency determines the > default position in Spanish, then secondarily the distribution of different > types of NPs, i.e. definite, indefinite and mass/bare plural NPs. As you I guess where we differ is not in the facts, but in the theoretical interpretation. I object to the use of a "formal" category or label such as "basic word order" or "default position" for grammatical categories--for all languages in general and for Spanish in particular. I think that this is an English-centric view, English being a language which displays a strong statistical correlation between its core grammatical categories (subject and object(s)) and position with respect to the verb. (Still, even for English the correlations are only statistical and don't apply much beyond subject and object.) I guess I think it's a mistake to say something is the "default position" and then the deviations from the norm are explained by extraneous factors, such as "discourse factors". To me this reflects a "transformational mentality" in linguistics (which precedes the transformational grammar tradition) which I don't think belongs in very many places in a cognitive theory of language. At least not in a functionalist one. I think that labels such as "basic word order" may be used informally by linguists involved in typology and description, but cannot be part of a theory of language (a theory of the cognitive representation of language). > pointed out, in Spanish intransitive clauses, one finds comparable > distribution between pre- and post-verbal subjects. So, frequency as a > criterion doesn't help. Next, if we look at the distribution of NP types > in pre- and post-verbal position, we find that all types mentioned above > appear postverbally, but not all types appear preverbally. This, as you > point out, is discourse related. It suggests, nevertheless, that the > default position for subjects in Spanish intrans. clauses is postverbal. But if we know the contexts in which subjects are postverbal vs. postverbal, then why don't we just set that as the "principle" or "strategy" or "rule" or what have you? (A in context B and C in context D). What do we gain by saying that subjects with certain pragmatic properties deviate from the "default position" for subjects? I don't think this is a matter of personal taste. This problem is well known in phonology: how do we deal with variations from a norm? Sometimes it seems to makes sense to posit an "underlying" or basic form and other times this is much more questionable (eg sandhi vs. word internal alternations). To me "basic order" in syntax is a questionable construct. > In transitive clauses, again because of discourse reasons, the subject > (which is mostly the topic) is overwhelmingly preverbal. Here frequency > tells us that for Spanish transitive clauses, preverbal position is the > default position for subjects. I think that the only reason that transitive subjects are more likely (statistically speaking) to be topics than intransitive ones is that whereas in intransitive assertions subjects are often foci (and thus postverbal), in transitive clauses an overt (full nominal) object is more likely to be the focus, for a variety of pragmatic and semantic reasons, which means that the subject has no "choice" but to be the topic (and thus typically "preverbal"). As soon as you add an optional complement to an asserted intransitive clause (Juan vino ayer 'Juan came yesterday'), you find that this added complement is much more likely to be the focus (than the subject is), which means that the subject is much more likely to be the topic. Thus the likelihood of a subject being preverbal vs. postverbal, ie of being the topic vs. the focus, is only *correlated* with whether the verb is transitive or not, but not at all caused or explained by it. (Note, however, that not all inverted subjects are foci; some subjects are inverted for other reasons, which I won't get into). > So, you find a pattern, apparent in the default position of the subject in > transitive and intransitive clauses, that is suggestive of an ergative > marking pattern in that trans. clause objects and intrans. clause subjects I guess I object to using the label "ergative" as an abstract, "platonic" property of languages. I object to using it as if it was "explanatory" in nature, when it is nothing but a name, or label, for a grammatical phenomenon: the coding of (some) "intransitive subjects" the same way as direct objects. > The claim is that Spanish > exhibits an ergative marking pattern, even though this pattern is > accounted for by discourse-related arguments. As I said, to me ergativity is a (typically morphological) *coding system*, a system which has its own logic and its own very interesting diachronic sources (but not an underlying pattern of linguistic organization). Now, word order in Spanish does not code grammatical relations at all but rather functional (informational) relations. It is true that there are *statistical* affinities between S and O in Spanish, and in all languages, but these affinities have explanations which are quite different from those which explain analogous grammatical coding (ergativity). > Postverbal subject word order is not grammaticalized in Spanish. Were it > to become grammaticalized, then one could speak of ergativity. The > reanalysis of passive marking in some languages leads to an ergative > marking. There are, though, transitional stages in the process of the > reanalysis. Spanish could be in a similar process with respect to the > position of its subject. I don't think that postverbal order of intransitive subjects could ever become grammaticalized in Spanish, or in any other language, simply because of the fact that the phenomenon does not have a grammatical basis, but rather an informational one. Ergative coding always comes about indirectly, by the reanalysis of constructions, given the fact the semantic and informational correlations between S and O are rather weak. > PO marking marks monotrans. DOs and ditransitive IOs identically, just as > intrans. subjects and trans. DOs are marked identically. This applies to human, or human-like, direct objects only, right? (*Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' I think is out of the question, as far as I know; but "Visito a mi perro" 'I visit my dog' is OK). I think that it's possible that this "syncretism" is motivated by the "need" to disambiguate objects from subjects when both have similar semantic characteristics (being human, as most transitive subjects are), and that it was facilitated by the semantic similarities between direct and indirect objects (both are typically human and in some way "recipient" or "benefactives" for the action). But I still don't understand what this has to do with ergativity. I am also highly skeptical of this category "primary object". About the "crucial test" sentence, *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*, I admit that this is a very interesting sentence. Still, the sentence seems to me more than a bit odd, and I think that to the extent that it is accepted by speakers, it probably has a very good explanation without having to resort to a primary object category. Leismo (and the personal a) makes sense because human direct objects are typically affected by actions in ways more like the way typical indirect objects (recipients, benefactives, malefactives) are than the way non-human (non-animate? non-empathetic?) objects are. To the extent that there can only be one such element, it makes sense that it would be the dative in this sentence (Marta), which would block the (diachronic or synchronic) extension of personal a marking to human objects like Luisa in this example. This would also explain why this sentence seems odd and is probably avoided by many speakers (except perhaps those for whom the construction is fully conventionalized). Anyway, thanks for your comments, and I encourage others to join in in this exchange. Best, Jon ____________________________ Jon Aske aske at earthlink.net or Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Sun Feb 8 12:03:19 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:03:19 +0200 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Would anyone happen to know the email address of Jim Gair? Thanks. John Myhill From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Feb 9 03:08:42 1998 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 22:08:42 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: I agree with Jon Aske that the notion of primary object is not relevant to case marking in Spanish, and that what is crucial to understanding the system is animacy and disambiguation. But I would like to recommend a paper that is directly relevant to this discussion, namely a paper by Carol Genetti on object relations in Dolakha Newari that appeared in Studies in Language in 1997. Case marking in Dolakha Newari is reminiscent of Spanish and as Carol argues (p. 59) "Dryer's analysis ... works well for a language where casemarking follows a true primary object pattern, but as Noonan (1991: 57) notes, it is not relevant for languages where only some patients are casemarked." At best, the pattern in languages like Dolakha Newari and Spanish may be a diachronic source for primary objectivity. Matthew Dryer From annes at HTDC.ORG Thu Feb 12 05:27:19 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 19:27:19 -1000 Subject: ESL Grammar Checker Available Message-ID: Japan Information Processing (JIP) or Nihon Denshi Keisan of Tokyo, Japan has just made their "English Sentence Enhancer" available for free over the Japanese internet. 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Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Thu Feb 12 15:55:28 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:55:28 -0600 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: Here is a late and minor contribution to the ergativity issue. Sorry for the delay but, for some reason, I could not connect to the net. I agree with Jon Aske´s comments and would like to add a minor piece of information. Assuming that Spanish is a Primary-Secondary Object Language based on a quite artificial example as *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*may be inadqeuate. The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy in Spanish. The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta* I would say 1) "Juan le presento´ a Luisa a Marta" I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: 2) Juan presento´ a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. By the way *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' is also very strange I would say *Visite´ Paris hace seis meses* "I visited Patris six months ago" No "a" there. The inclusion of the preposition "a" would impose a reading where Paris is affected by my visit. I must be missing something here because I cannot see how this could be an argument for an Ergative interpretation. Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Thu Feb 12 16:12:53 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 10:12:53 -0600 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: This may come a bit late in the discussionof ergativity. I could not send it before becuase, for some reason, I could only recieve but not send messages to the net. I hope some of you are still interested in the topic. I agree with Jon Aske´s comments and would like to add a minor piece of information. Assuming that Spanish is a Primary-Secondary Object Language based on a quite artificial example as *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*may be inadqeuate. The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy in Spanish. The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta* I would say 1) "Juan le presento´ a Luisa a Marta" I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: 2) Juan presento´ a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. By the way *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' is also very strange I would say *Visite´ Paris hace seis meses* "I visited Patris six months ago" No "a" there. The inclusion of the preposition "a" would impose a reading where Paris is affected by my visit. I must be missing something here because I cannot see how this could be an argument for an Ergative interpretation. Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Feb 12 18:16:36 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 13:16:36 -0500 Subject: Spanish objects (WAS: Ergativity) In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I'm glad that Ricardo confirms my initial reaction to that very interesting Spanish example of Clancy's in which the "personal a" is not present with a human object in Spanish when there is a dative around (cf. Juan presento Luisa a Marta). (My initial reaction being that the issue is more complex that that single example might suggest and that different strategies may be followed by speakers in a situation which is confusing and rare, avoidance being definitely one.) I would just like to report another reaction to that sentence which was sent to me directly by Victoria Vázquez Rozas of the Facultade de Filoloxía of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia(fevvazq at usc.es). I quote it in full (with her permission), cause I think the (real, live) data is very interesting. I love in particular the ambiguous example at the end. >>>>>> BEGINNING OF QUOTE (my translation, JA) ... Examples such as *Juan presentó Luisa a Marta* also present some difficulties. On the one hand, as a speaker, this example seems very strange to me (I don't think I would ever say anything like that). On the other hand, I have been able to corroborate their rarity in a modern Spanish corpus. The research group I am part of has created a syntactic database with more than 160,000 clauses from a modern Spanish corpus. There are 362 tokens of the verb "presentar" [introduce], of which 22 correspond to the syntactic schema Subject(animate)-Indirect object(animate)-Direct object (animate). In a great many of them, both the direct and indirect objects are coded only as clitic pronouns (e.g. "Un chico no se acercaba a una muchacha en el paseo ni la sacaba a bailar sin que se (OI) la (OD) hubieran presentado previamente" [a boy would not approach a girl or take her out to dance without anybody having introduced her to him first]). In other examples, only one of the objects is a clitic ("Te presento a la madre de mi novio"; "Recuerda que un buen día un amigo le presentó a su prima"); in these cases, the clitic is the indirect object and the full subject with a "personal a" is a direct object. Only one of the examples is ambiguous in its interpretation: "Hoy precisamente doy una comida y quiero presentarte a mis amigos, les vas a encantar" [Just today I'm having some people for dinner and I want to [introduce you to my friends / introduce my friends to you], they're going to love you.] If instead of "les vas a encantar" [they're going to love you], the text said "te van a encantar" [you're going to love them], the most plausible interpretation would be similar to that in the rest of the examples; however because it says "les vas a encantar" it seems easier to interpret "te" as direct object and "a mis amigos" as indirect object. ... >>>>>>>>>> END OF QUOTE Out of context the clause "quiero presentarte a mis amigos" is completely ambiguous between I want to introduce you to my friends and I want to introduce my friends to you. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it too. Best, Jon ________________________________ Jon Aske mailto://Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu or mailto://aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 Bat eman eta bi hartu, gure etxean ez berriz sartu ** "Give one and take two, don't come back into our house.". --Basque Proverb From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sat Feb 14 04:33:42 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 23:33:42 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I apologize too for arriving "a la hora latina" at the discussion. My comments are rather general and are not intended as taking sides but rather as summarizing and bringing additinal aspects to the discussion. RE: Ergativity correlations: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Clancy's original proposal is crystal clear and should come as no surprise, given well-established 'findings' in the literature on ergativity such as DuBois (1987) and Durie (1988, I guess, anyway, his article in Lingua). According to Clancy, the fact that unmarked transitive clauses in Spanish tend to be of the SVO (or AVO) type plus the fact that unmarked transitive ones tend to be VS should speak for a discourse-based (in the sense that the distribution of such orders is pragmatically determined) tendency to syntactically treat O (transitive object) and S (intransitive subject) similarly, that is both in postverbal position. I see no tragedy in that PROVIDED -ojo- PROVIDED, one can with a comfortable degree of certainty establish that there is indeed a tendency for intransitive sentences to be VS in most contexts (not just with full subject NPs, discourse-initially, which I'm afraid is the case) as well as for transitive clauses to be SVO. I have no text counts to make any claims, but I suspect such counts would yield a "tie" rather than a "win" to the claimed unmarked status of such orders, again PROVIDED we can all agree on a language-specific definition of unmarked orders in this language. RE: Objects > Ricardo wrote: > The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy > in Spanish. > The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give > more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta > Luisa a Marta* I would say > > 1) "Juan le presento� a Luisa a Marta" > > I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is > required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word > order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the > deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact > the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: > > 2) Juan presento� a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" > > where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. > > Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the > IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the > strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. What constitutes more "natural" strategies is a highly complicated matter in Spanish. What I would like to stress is the fact that presence/absence of 'a' is not a matter of "strategies" (for what?), nor is there a preference to either keep or delete 'a', but -as already latent in Ricardo's posting- is determined by the identifiability of the referents (needless to say, even less to whether they are "personal" objects or not, an outdated view that unexplicably has lots of followers). That is, the role of 'a' in Spanish is one of reference and as such belongs in the function of agreement and not in the one of case; 'a' is not a marker of dependency relations. I have argued for that in a paper (1995) in Orbis 38. I found these sentences while reading a History of Central America on the way home tonight: (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien a la importacion de productos europeos. Source: Fonseca, Elizabeth. (1933). "Economia y sociedad en Centroamerica". In Pinto, Julio (ed.). El Periodo Colonial. Historia General de Centroamerica. Vol 2. Madrid: FLACSO. The text is written by native speakers. From the examples we can corroborate that: a. 'le' is an obligatory cross-referencing mechanism; b. 'le' has shifted from the case (dependency) function to that of agreement (reference); c. the use of 'a' as reference -not case- marker is still dependent on several factors, that is, it has not been syntacticized yet as much as 'le', some of which are the inherent features of the objects, discourse relevance of the referents it "agrees" with, etc. As such, its use is intermittent. d. there is no way to tell whether in (1) the absence of 'a' is the result of a strategy from the writer to avoid 'a' doubling, even less possible is it to say that the absence of 'a' in (1) is a "less natural manner". (1) sounds perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence. Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of (1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). The desambiguation approach as insinuated above by Ricardo -which I must admit is a bit 'foggy'- falls short there. > Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance > of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument > for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested > to know his reasoning on this topic. > Ricardo Maldonado I second Ricardo's plea for clarification there too. Diego Quesada University of Toronto From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sat Feb 14 17:52:57 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 12:52:57 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, Diego, and company, Some further comments on all these matters, which I hope those who are not familiar with the Spanish data are being able to follow (I am including translations of Diego's examples). About the correlation between S and O and postverbal position and A and preverbal position in Spanish, I repeat I think this is a rather weak correlation. In my experience, overt (full nominal) objects (O's) tend to be foci, as do about half of overt intransitive subjects (S's). Not so much overt A's, however. This explains the fact that overt S's are postverbal more often than overt A's are, since foci are predominantly postverbal in Spanish. Let us not forget that word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical relations in Spanish at all. And let us not forget that: a) Very salient foci (i.e. emphatic or contrastive ones), be they subjects or objects or what have you, are typically placed preverbally (as in so-called "OV languages"), cf. Silva-Corvalán's (1984) well-known example: *Efortil me dieron a mi!* "Efortil{Foc} they gave me," "Efortil is what they gave me" (the clitic *me* is like part of the verb for information structure purposes, so the focus counts as being immediately preverbal). b) Subjects (and all other settings) may also be postverbal, not because they are foci, but because they are topics in an assertion with a very salient foci (cf. exclamations, e.g. *Siempre viene Juan los viernes!* "Juan ALWAYS comes on Fridays"; *Cuando viene Juan?* "when does Juan come). These "antitopics" do not receive an information accent, such as foci and left-dislocated topics do. About the so-called (don't blame me) "personal A": > What constitutes more "natural" strategies is a highly complicated > matter in Spanish. No doubt about it. > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... [the threat of confiscating the Indians from them] (For those who are not familiar with the language, the interesting thing here is that there is no (so-called personal) "a" before "los indios".) > (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de > Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien > a la importacion de productos europeos. [the very sporadic arrival of ships to the Honduran harbors didn't only affect [a] (the) exports, but also the imports, of European products] (The interesting thing here is that the (inanimate) object of affect has the "a".) Surely these are interesting cases in that they don't follow the traditional rule, according to which human direct objects bear the A and non-human objects don't. It seems to me that the traditional rule works for 95% of the cases (in writing perhaps a bit less, since writing tends to be more conservative), and that most of the exceptions can be seen as extensions of the rule (such as pets being treated as humans, for example). That still leaves examples such as the ones above, which, I repeat, are very interesting. The lack of A in the first example (treating the object's referent as an object, or merchandise) may be due, not so much to the presence of a covert human dative (a clitic, not a full nominal), but to the desire to avoid ambiguity, since without context, the sentence: La amenaza de confiscarles A los indios... could mean either (1) the threat of confiscating the Indians from them or (2) the threat of confiscating from the Indians (of course a racist attitude towards Indians could have something to do with it too). But I think there is another reason for not using the A in the first example, which would also be a reason for using the A in the second example, namely the fact that confiscar (confiscate) typically takes an inanimate direct object (merchandise) and that afectar (affect) typically takes a human direct object, and thus the absence vs. presence of the A is somewhat automatic (grammaticalized). The possibility of dropping the A in the first example would be due to the fact that the object of confiscate is typically some type of merchandise and merchandise is not marked with A, be it human or not. (But if it wasn't Indians but, say, relatives, the personal A would not have been ommitted.) The addition of the A in the second example, which by the way doesn't sound all that great to my non Costa Rican ears, I can only see as an extension of the prototypical case in which the affected party is human. Just some thoughts. Let me know what you think Best, Jon From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sun Feb 15 03:24:06 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 22:24:06 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802141753.JAA17061@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 14 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > About the correlation between S and O and postverbal position and A and > preverbal position in Spanish, I repeat I think this is a rather weak > correlation. In my experience, overt (full nominal) objects (O's) tend to > be foci, as do about half of overt intransitive subjects (S's). Not so > much overt A's, however. This explains the fact that overt S's are > postverbal more often than overt A's are, since foci are predominantly > postverbal in Spanish. Having made no counts myself I have nothing to say here. Still, just on paper -that is, regardless of the information structure of the A, S, and O referents- the fact that one-argument structures tend to be postverbal while two-argument structures tend to be SVO matches -accidentally if you like- the ergative pattern. This, I assume, was Clancy's original proposal. Now, I'd be surprised if such a pattern were recurrent, frequent, and likely to be categorically predicted. For one, as Jon suggests: > word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical > relations in Spanish at all. Second, Spanish, as many other languages, tends to make a basic distinction between the word order of sentence at discourse-onset (thetic, in Lambrecht's 1994 terminology), with full (overt) NPs, and the rest; the former do tend to be S/A-initial; the others... well, it takes all kinds. This fact, rather than supporting Clancy's claim, speaks for a discourse-determined word order pattern, as determined basically by topic continuity. In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. Thus, despite the arroz-con-mango style of word order in Spanish, it seems to be in line with what occurs in many (?) other languages of different affiliations. > b) Subjects (and all other settings) may also be postverbal, not because > they are foci, but because they are topics in an assertion with a very > salient foci (cf. exclamations, e.g. *Siempre viene Juan los viernes!* "Juan > ALWAYS comes on Fridays"; *Cuando viene Juan?* "when does Juan come). These > "antitopics" do not receive an information accent, such as foci and > left-dislocated topics do. Is the double-starring signalling ungramaticality/unacceptability or what? In any case, I'd tend to say the first of those sentences with Juan at the left (Juan siempre...). The other one sounds OK. > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... > [the threat of confiscating the Indians from them] > > (For those who are not familiar with the language, the interesting thing > here is that there is no (so-called personal) "a" before "los indios".) > > > (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de > > Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien > > a la importacion de productos europeos. > [the very sporadic arrival of ships to the Honduran harbors didn't only > affect [a] (the) exports, but also the imports, of European products] > > (The interesting thing here is that the (inanimate) object of affect has the > "a".) > > Surely these are interesting cases in that they don't follow the traditional > rule, according to which human direct objects bear the A and non-human > objects don't. There you go! I have lots of cases -from both oral and written language- that show that presence/absence of 'a' has every time less to do with the human/animate status of the direct object referent. Typical in this respect are cases of left-dislocation where the D.O. is not 'a'-marked: (3) Juan lo vi ayer Juan 3sg.masc see-perf yesterday ***WITHOUT*** a pause between Juan and the rest of the sentence (this is part of a long story I won't go into). Just as there are cases of inanimate D.O.'s which are 'a'-marked: (from Suner 1989) (4) Lo van a empujar al omnibus. 3sg.masc go-3pres.pl a-3def.sg bus Besides, cases as those in (5a-d) are more than common: (5a) Busque abogado si no quiere que lo guarden Look for-imper. lawyer if [2sg] neg want-2sg that 3sg. put-3subj.pl in jail 'You'd better get yourself a lawyer if you don't want to end up in jail' (5b) Busque un abogado... (5c) Busque a un abogado si no... (5d) Busque abogados si no... (5e) ? Busque a unos abogados si no... (5f) ? Busue unos abogados si no... Clearly, being human is not a necessary condition for 'a'-marking. The key to the puzzle lies in that 'a' is not a marker of grammatical relations anymore. The system is moving to a different pattern. > I think there is another reason for not using the A in the first > example, which would also be a reason for using the A in the second example, > namely the fact that confiscar (confiscate) typically takes an inanimate > direct object (merchandise) and that afectar (affect) typically takes a > human direct object, and thus the absence vs. presence of the A is somewhat > automatic (grammaticalized). > > The possibility of dropping the A in the first example would be due to the > fact that the object of confiscate is typically some type of merchandise and > merchandise is not marked with A, be it human or not. (But if it wasn't > Indians but, say, relatives, the personal A would not have been ommitted.) Could be. > The addition of the A in the second example, which by the way doesn't sound > all that great to my non Costa Rican ears, I can only see as an extension of > the prototypical case in which the affected party is human. Could be too, thereby partially confirming the old rule of [+ human] referents, but which is giving way to a new shift in the language. Diego From A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL Sun Feb 15 11:56:36 1998 From: A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL (A.M. Bolkestein) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 12:56:36 +0100 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras (1995) on VS order in a number of European languages (among other classical Latin (by me), Italian (by Giuliano Bernini) , modern Greek (by Hans Juergen Sasse), data from early Romance languages, among other, I believe, early Spanish data (Rosanna Sornicola). There are statistical data in some of these articles, and , among other, attention for both semantic parameters (valency) and discourse conditions. Why not have a look at it? It is I believe directly relevant. Machtelt Bolkestein Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam Oude Turfmarkt 129 NL-1012 GC Amsterdam Fax: ++31.20.5252544 E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at let.uva.nl From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sun Feb 15 14:16:52 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 09:16:52 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische > Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras > (1995) on > VS order in a number of European languages... Thanks very much for the tip. J. Diego Quesada From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Feb 15 15:59:31 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 10:59:31 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Machtelt, Thanks for bringing up that reference. Sasse and Matras (1995) is a very interesting collection of studies, in particular Sasse's two articles in that volume, as is Sasse's wonderful 1987 article on thetic sentences ("The thetic/categorical distinction revisited," Linguistics 25, 1987). My major problem with the approach followed in those studies, besides the fact that they don't look at actual spoken data, but rather data from different written genres, is that they use a structural property--postverbal position of the subject--to categorize assertions. As I have argued before, I believe that there are two rather different reasons why a subject might be postverbal in these "VO languages", namely (1) when the subject is the focus. Then it receives the information accent associated with the assertion. But we must remember too that not all foci are postverbal: more salient ones are often preverbal in these languages, e.g. JUAN vino! "Juan (is who) came"; Un LIbro trajo! "a book (is what) he brought"). (Beware: these sentences typically need context and sound a bit odd out of the blue and when used to elicit acceptability judgements) and (2) when the subject is an accessible (anti)topic, and then it doesn't receive an information accent. This type of "postposing" can be seen in the so-called right-dislocation construction in English (which doesn't really dislocate the subject, as Ziv 1994 for instance has successfully argued, "Left and right dislocations: Discourse functions and anaphora"), but it is much more common in less rigid VO languages. The motivation for this type of postposing, I believe, is the presence of a very salient focus in the assertion, which is why this "strategy" is associated with exclamations and other types of emphatic assertions, as well as content questions, and so on. This "strategy" seems to easily acquire additional "rhetorical" uses, which are to some extent conventionalized, thus I found that it is very common in Mexican newspaper headlines, but not in Spanish newspaper headlines; also, this type of inversion is more common in conversation and in some conversational styles than others, not surprisingly since it is related to "focus emphasis", and thus an "optional" "operation". (These sentences too, and emphatic assertions in general, sometimes sound odd out of context when used to elicit acceptability judgements) (Note too that this type of postposing extends to settings of all types, such as locatives, temporals, conditionals, etc, not just to topics (which I believe are just a specialized type of setting). Thus, e.g., "Come here [when I call you]!" What will you do [if I don't go]?) The first type of subject postposing (focus subject) is much more common with intransitive (and monovalent) predicates than with transitive (and polyvalent) predicates for the simple reason that in these situations there are less candidates for the focus role and thus the subject is more likely to be the focus (I believe all assertions have a focus constituent, which receives the "comment"'s information accent, and that not all assertions have a topic, though most do). The second type of subject postposing (antitopic subject) I believe happens equally with polyvalent/transitive predicates as with monovalent/intransitive ones. I should also mention that I don't think that all clauses which have a postverbal focus subject are thetic, since in many cases another argument of the verb fills the topic role, something which Sasse does not mention (cf., e.g., Spanish: "Y cuando llego, lo vio mi PAdre" And when he arrived my father saw him...). Anyway, for this reason I believe that there may be problems using Sasse's group's data for our purposes, even though it is undoubtedly very interesting and Sasse's original study was definitely ground-breaking. Also, as I just mentioned, the use of topic inversion varies a great deal from genre to genre and style to style, which means we have to be very careful about not comparing apples with oranges when we compare languages. Best, Jon > -----Original Message----- > From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics > [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of A.M. Bolkestein > Sent: Sunday, February 15, 1998 6:57 AM > To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU > Subject: Re: Ergativity and objects in Spanish > > > There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische > Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras > (1995) on > VS order in a number of European languages (among other classical Latin > (by me), Italian (by Giuliano Bernini) , modern Greek (by Hans Juergen > Sasse), data from early Romance languages, among other, I believe, > early Spanish data (Rosanna Sornicola). There are statistical data in > some of these articles, and , among other, attention for both semantic > parameters (valency) and discourse conditions. Why not have a look at it? > It is I believe directly relevant. > Machtelt Bolkestein > Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam > Oude Turfmarkt 129 > NL-1012 GC Amsterdam > Fax: ++31.20.5252544 > E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at let.uva.nl > ________________________________ Jon Aske mailto://Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu or mailto://aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ Beltz guztiak ez dira ikatz ** "Not everything that's black is coal.". --Basque Proverb From clements at INDIANA.EDU Sun Feb 15 18:14:37 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 13:14:37 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Feb 1998, Ricardo Maldonado wrote: > Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance > of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument > for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested > to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo, Diego, Jon, and other funknetters, Here's what I had in mind with leismo suggesting a Primary Object - Secondary Object pattern. I'll cite data from Klein-Andreu and then offer a brief explanation. LE/LO pronominalization of masc. direct objects Animates Inanimates le lo %le le lo %le St. Teresa 83 2 98% 22 3 88% Professional Women 67 6 92% 16 21 43% Rural Speakers 36 0 100% 22 6 76% "Frequency of le as a function of the referents' animacy in (1) writings of St. Teresa; (2) speech of present-day Castilian professional women; (3) speech of present-day Castilian rural speakers. Only count NPs were considered." From Klein-Andreu, Flora. 1992. Understanding standards. In Garry W. David and Gregory K. Iverson (eds.) Explanation in historical linguistics, 176-78.Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. The point is this: monotrans. DOs and ditrans. IOs are marked increasingly by LE, in some cases (e.g. rural Castilian speakers) exclusively by LE. This suggests that a Primary OBj. - Secondary Object system is being adopted for masc. In future, this may or may not extend into the domain of the fem DO. At present in rural speakers, we have the following: Primary Object: LE (masc/fem. IO; masc. monotrans. DO) and LA (fem DO) Secondary Object: LO (masc.) LA (fem.) There is some evidence that LE is found with fem. DO. In Baroja, for example, we find the following (from Marcos Marin _Estud. sobre el pronombre_, 1978, p.255): LE D.O. masc. person 131 fem person 6 animals 6 thing 1 Baroja was Basque and, consequently, there might be something going on there (cf. Alazne Landa's dissertation on Basque Spanish for substrate influence of Basque on Spanish of that region). In his analysis of the magazine ABC as an example of modern Castilian, Marcos Marin says there seem to be two pronominal systems in Castilian: the etymological one (the DO-IO system), and a second system where the masc. animate DO is being replaced by LE. He discovered, however, a third system as well, in which, he says, LE has triumphed as the pronoun for the masc. and "is invading dangerously but not overwhelmingly the domain of the feminine..." The feminine DO pronoun LA is, acc. to Marcos Marin, gradually losing ground to LE. In my estimation, the Castilian pronominal system seems to be moving towards a PO - SO system, where all monotrans. animate (and gradually inanimate) DOs are pronominalized by LE(S), all IOs are pronominalized by LE(S), and all ditrans. DOs are pronominalized by LO(s)/LA(s). Now, as for full objects NPs, *Luisa presento' Juan a sus padres* is admittedly odd (though found acceptable by some native speakers I consulted). Another option *Luisa presento' a Juan a sus padres* was preferred by another native speaker I consulted. Still other native speakers said they'd avoid the construction, which coincides with Victoria Valzquez' findings, which Jon was nice enough to translate and share with all. The conclusion regarding full NP marking, then, as reflecting or suggesting a PO - SO system instead of a DO - IO system, in inconclusive. I find the pronominalization facts more suggestive of a PO - SO system. Finally, please disregard the _visito a Paris_ example, which is, as Ricardo pointed out, irrelevant for the discussion at hand. Saludos, Clancy From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Feb 16 04:02:39 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 23:02:39 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clancy & Co., I was familiar with the very interesting data you give us (the Spanish that I am most familiar with is very similar to Baroja's Spanish), but I am really not convinced that your conclusion about the changes in the object system is warranted. It seems to me that other, more "mundane", reasons may very well be at play here, though I admit I don't have a fully coherent theory about it, just some half-baked ideas. My main reason for being skeptical I guess has to do with the fact that non-human direct objects are for the most part excluded from being treated (coded the same way) as indirect objects (both for the purpose of adding the A or of having the "dative" LE clitic as opposed to the LO/LA "accusative" clitic). If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just to those with human referents. What I see, rather, is a syncretism between datives and accusatives that share semantic properties of prototypical datives (humanness, affectedness, etc.). We could call that the "enabling motivation" for the syncretism. Then the "communicative motivation" for the syncretism could be the fact that it enables the coding of an accusative nominal differently from a nominative one, something which can come in very handy, especially when the two have similar "semantic profiles" in a language with rather flexible word order (i.e. one driven by pragmatic, not grammatical, relations). The fact that non-human accusatives are excluded from this syncretism to me suggests that these changes are not really changes in an abstract system of grammatical relations. (I must confess that I tend to prefer concrete, system-external arguments to abstract, system-internal ones; the latter are what was traditionally known as functional explanations in linguistics, the former is what modern functionalists tend to favor nowadays). This still leaves the mystery of why LE wasn't extended as readily to masculine accusatives as to feminine ones, even while the "personal A" extended equally to accusatives of both genders. I think the reason for this may have to do with a blockage to the spread of LE to feminines caused by a 'faint' association between LE and masculine gender. I know this sounds like a lame reason, especially given that LE is not gender specific when used as a dative pronoun, and that the block is obviously not insurmountable, but I really think that there may be something to this conjecture. I would love to hear what others think about this. I would also like to have the diachronic facts about the development of LE, LO, LA, which I don't have at my fingertips right now, and which I think may provide some clues. Cheers, Jon """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu / aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always have some people on your side that you wish were on the other side. --Jascha Heifetz From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Mon Feb 16 14:25:24 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 09:25:24 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802160402.UAA22601@italy.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Just a word on what On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to > give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just > to those with human referents. Of course; it has to start somewhere; from humans it will spread. There are cases of 'le' referring to non-animate objects: (1) Desde alla no se le ve [From there you can't see it] where 'le' can refer to any landmark (the crater of a volcano, the see, a tuny island in the bay, etc.). > What I see, rather, is a syncretism between datives and accusatives that > share semantic properties of prototypical datives (humanness, affectedness, > etc.). Well, this is exactly what is going on; that's why it comes a s a surprise to me that you would expect all this to happen at once. For sure, it's a recent development. > We could call that the "enabling motivation" for the syncretism. > Then the "communicative motivation" for the syncretism could be the fact > that it enables the coding of an accusative nominal differently from a > nominative one, something which can come in very handy, especially when the > two have similar "semantic profiles" in a language with rather flexible word > order (i.e. one driven by pragmatic, not grammatical, relations). This makes sense and is not incompatible at all with the fact that 'le-extension' has not gone very far yet (but which is in progress). Diego From gallego at UVIGO.ES Mon Feb 16 15:22:05 1998 From: gallego at UVIGO.ES (Jose M. Garcia.Miguel) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 16:22:05 +0100 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: Hello to all Funknetters worried about Spanish syntax. I would like to say something about ergativity and object in Spanish, but first I must apologize for this sort of English / Spanglish I write RE: Objects in Spanish Agreeing with J. Aske and relying on the data provided by Vazquez Rozas and by Ricardo Maldonado, it seems clear to me that Spanish has not a "Primary Object" system. The object of ditransitive clauses [P2] has the very same realisations that the objecto of monotransitive clauses [P1]. And both allow realisations (lo, bare NP) forbidden to Indirect Object [R]. That is P1 : le/lo, (a)+NP [OD in monotransitive clauses] P2 : le/lo, (a) NP [OD in ditransitive clauses] R : le, a NP (but *lo, *NP) [OI in ditransitive clauses] --> le/lo[OD] veo, veo a Juan[OD], veo el libro [OD] (monotransitive) --> le/lo[OD] presenté a mis amigos[OI], (ditransitive) --> le [OI] presenté el informe[OD], --> le [OI] presenté a mis amigos [OD] (potentially ambiguous) I think, a 'primary object' system should equate P1 = R, and at the same time P1 # P2. At most, variable object marking may suggest that, for some dialect -'leistas'- and for some objects -most of all, masculine nouns high in the animacy hierarchy, and speech act participants pronouns- we have a NEUTRAL system which equates P1 = P2 = R. That is: P1 = P2 = R : le, a FN Nevertheless, the potential ambiguity arising in ditransitive clauses witth two human objects, is rarely foun in real discourse, where the different degrees of topicality for each referent. Normally at most one object should appear as a full NP (I think this has to do with Chafe's "one new idea constraint" -I lost the exact reference) RE: Ergativity effects in Spanish intransitive clauses. I agree with Jon Aske about that: > word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical > relations in Spanish at all. On the other hand, there seems to be no 'basic word order' in Spanish intransitive clauses. I do have some statistical data from ARTHUS (the corpus of contemporary Spanish of the University os Santiago de Compostela, also cited by V. Vázquez Rozas / Jon Aske's translation)The date refer only to full NP participants (this data are included in my book "Tnsitividad y complementacion preposicional en español", published by the University of Santiago de Compostela): (mono)transitive clauses: AV / VA VO / OV 78% / 22% 97'5% / 2,5% Intransitive clauses: SV / VS 47% / 53% Of course, it remains to be explained, as J. Aske points out, the influence of discourse functions, such as topic or focus, that is what decides word order in Spanish. In any case, those of you interested in word order in Spanish will fin useful the in-depth study by Belén López Meirama: La posición del sujeto en la cláusula monoactancial del español, also published by the University of Santiago de Compostela. She studies the correlation of word order -in intransitive clauses- with verb class, control, animacy and definiteness. In any case, I think that we can not talk about ergativity if we don't pay attention to grammatical marking (agreement, case, ...). It is grammatical grammatical marking what gives ergative, accusative and active systems. We don't have an ergative system relying only in the semantic or discourse functions of S. It sems clear that agentivity and topicality are typical properties of A vs. O, but a priori S, the unique participant of monotransitives, is NEUTRAL in this respect, sometimes more like A, sometimes more like O. It is grammaticalisation what gives preminence to the semantic and pragmatic similarity with A (accusative systems) or to the semantic and pragmatic similarity with O (ergative systems) PD: A note on Chibchan languages Diego Quesada wrote: > In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan > languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the > word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): > SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. > I'm doing right now some work on textual data of Chibchan languages of Costa Rica -Bribri, Guatuso. They are OV languages, with variable order of A, resulting as far as I now in AOV and OVA, but not OAV. I'm interested in the discourse factors that correlate with the position of A, and especially in the factors that correlate with the presence or absence of the ergative morpheme, which in this languages is sometimes optional. I guess this has to do with topicality and with the distinction between given and new information. Could you give me some tips? Best regards -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jose M. Garcia-Miguel Linguistica Xeral Departamento de Traduccion, Linguistica e Teoria da Literatura Tfno: +34 86 812355 - Universidade de Vigo Fax: +34 86 812380 - Aptdo. 874 correo-e: gallego at uvigo.es - E-36201 VIGO ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Mon Feb 16 17:06:05 1998 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 12:06:05 EST Subject: From Dan Everett Message-ID: Please send any replies to Dan Everett, dever at verb.linguist.pitt.edu. ------- Forwarded Message Subject: TOC - Journal of Amazonian Languages The second issue of Volume 1 of the Journal of Amazonian Languages is now in press and should be mailed out the second week of March. The articles in this issue are: 'The use of coreferential and reflexive markers in Tupi-Guarani languages', by Cheryl Jensen. (pp1-49) 'Aspects of ergativity in Marubo (Panoan), by Raquel Guimaraes R. Costa. (pp50-103) 'The acoustic correlates of stress in Piraha', by Keren M. Everett. (pp104-162). Requests for subscriptions may be sent to: Ms. Carolyn Anderson Department of Linguistics 2816 CL University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 ------- End of Forwarded Message From clements at INDIANA.EDU Mon Feb 16 22:06:40 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 17:06:40 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <34E8599D.593670D1@uvigo.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jose M. Garcia.Miguel wrote: > In any case, I think that we can not talk about ergativity if we don't > pay attention to > grammatical marking (agreement, case, ...). It is grammatical > grammatical marking what gives > ergative, accusative and active systems. We don't have an ergative > system relying only in the > semantic or discourse functions of S. This whole discussion started by my talking about ergative-type patterns in Spanish. I agree that Spanish is not an ergative language. I think, however, that there are suggestions of ergative-like patterns in the order of intrans. clause subjects and trans. clause objects. Also, there seems to be a move toward ergative patterning in pronominalization. In the big picture, Spanish may be moving toward such an ergative pattern, which at one point could become grammaticalized. The grammaticalization of discourse phenomena is not that uncommon. (Cf. the grammaticalization of preposing/posposing rules in VO --> OV shift for example). Clancy From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 17 01:55:29 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 20:55:29 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802160402.UAA22601@italy.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > My main reason for being skeptical I guess has to do with the fact that > non-human direct objects are for the most part excluded from being treated > (coded the same way) as indirect objects (both for the purpose of adding the > A or of having the "dative" LE clitic as opposed to the LO/LA "accusative" > clitic). If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to > give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just > to those with human referents. If you look at Klein Andreu's data, just this seems to be the case. For example: Rural speakers of Castilian: Animate masc. DOs 100% le Inanimate masc. DOs 76% le St. Teresa Animate masc. DOs 98% Inanimate masc. DOs 88% This is pretty high for inanimates, and points to an ever-increasing dominance of LE for DOs. Marcos Marin (1978:283) points to LE "invading the domain of the fem. DO". But I'm repeating myself. Jon asks: > This still leaves the mystery of why LE wasn't extended as readily to > masculine accusatives as to feminine ones, even while the "personal A" > extended equally to accusatives of both genders. It's not being extended equally to both genders. Rather, LE has taken over first masc. animate DOs, then masc. inanimate DOs, and now animate (and inanimate?) feminine DOs, according to Klein-Andreu and Marcos Marin's data. It's a gradual process, apparently. Saludos, Clancy From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 02:27:20 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:27:20 -0500 Subject: Ergativity & Chibchan In-Reply-To: <34E8599D.593670D1@uvigo.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jose M. Garcia.Miguel wrote: > Diego Quesada wrote: > > > In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan > > languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the > > word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): > > SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. > I'm doing right now some work on textual data of Chibchan languages of > Costa Rica -Bribri, Guatuso. They are OV languages, with variable order > of A, resulting as far as I now in AOV and OVA, **but not OAV**. [starrs mine, DQ] I never said that Bribri or Guatuso's alternative orders are OSV; in fact, I did not mention those two languages, cf. above. The alternative OVS order is for Boruca and Teribe; the alternative OSV is for Rama, from Nicaragua. > I'm > interested in the discourse factors that correlate with the position of > A, and especially in the factors that correlate with the presence or > absence of the ergative morpheme, which in this languages is sometimes > optional. I guess this has to do with topicality and with the > distinction between given and new information. Could you give me some > tips? I'm baking that cake too; so I might not wish to cut the cake before it is baked. But here is the basic thing for Boruca and Teribe: full NP's in the SOV and SV orders tend to appear discourse-initially. In most other instances both 0-anaphora or the alternative orders (VS/OVS) are commonplace. Just like in Spanish, full NP realization of referents here and there within a text is used for emphasis or desambiguation. A collection of Teribe texts (with Spanish glosses) by me is in press. As for the specifics of the invarible ergative-marking of Bribri, you'll have to contact A. Constenla: aconsten at cariari.ucr.ac.cr I'm not so sure that Guatuso has such a pattern of invariable ergativity- marking; Guatuso differs from the other Chibchan ergative languages in that it works more like the Mayan languages (it even has various antipassives -absent elsewhere in Central American Chibchaland- like those Mesoamerican languages). The reason, I suspect, has to do with the fact that ergativity marking in Guatuso (like in Mayan) is expressed in the agreement -cross referencing- system, while in the other Chibchan languages it is expressed by direct marking. Now, given that most Chibchan languages are highly "discourse-run" (lots of 0 anaphora; most tests for subjecthood such as gapping in coordination, etc. fail there; there is intermittent marking of grammatical categories such as plural, ergativity, even person in Teribe -which has a highly grammaticalized person agreement system), which means that marking of categories is intermittenty, applied only when needed, the presence/absence of "erg" in Bribri (and in its closest relative, Cabecar) -and to a lesser degree in Guatuso- depends, as you correctly suspect, on discourse-pragmatic aspects. For Bribri, too, you will have to contact Constenla, and also C. Jara cjara at cariari.ucr.ac.cr It goes without saying that the Journal Estudios de Linguistica Chibcha will be of great help. Saludos, Diego From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 17 02:30:18 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:30:18 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... because-of say these things my grandmother "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... Any ideas about how to account for this would be most appreciated. Thanks, Clancy From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Feb 17 03:49:38 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 22:49:38 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, again, On Monday, February 16, 1998 9:30 PM J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) said: > I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented > response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and > gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > > Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... > because-of say these things my grandmother > "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > > *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... First of all I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is interefering with my Spanish here. But assuming Clancy's data is right, and it probably is for some dialect or another, I don't have a story for why it HAS to be this way, since I don't know the diachronic (hi)story of the construction, but I could make a plausible one up and say that this makes perfect sense once we realize that these are unasserted clauses and thus the notion topic is not relevant to them the way it is to asserted clauses. As I see it, a topic typically has an external subfunction--linking the proposition to the world of discourse--and an internal subfunction--serving as the base for the proposition (what the asserted proposition is about). Non asserted clauses may have linking elements, but only asserted clauses may have internal, predication topics. When these topics are expressed by full nominals they are typically clause initial (unless they are inverted, or antitopics). Now, since the notion topic (as well as the notion focus) is not really relevant to non-asserted clauses, it is not surprising that the subject is not preverbal, since preverbal position is typically correlated with topics in Spanish and postverbal position is associated with everything else. Now for the second part of this story (another motivation for the Por-VS order). Remember that in the majority of these non-asserted causal, POR setting clauses, the subject is elided, since it is coreferential with the subject of the asserted clause. This would motivate the "fusion", or "cliticization", or what-have-you of the POR subordinator and the infinitive, which then would motivate the avoidance of placing overt subjects in between when they are ocasionally present, since they are not topics anyway (sort of like the tendency not to "split infinitives" in English). How is that for a functionalist made-up story? Best, Jon PS Regarding the possibility of having a preverbal subject, I wonder if native speakers allow it in the finite versions of these non-asserted clauses, such as the following: Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. (as opposed to: Porque dijo estas cosas mi abuela, nos fuimos todos a casa. or Porque dijo mi abuela estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. ) To me it doesn't sound bad. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. --Plato, From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Tue Feb 17 11:04:40 1998 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 12:04:40 +0100 Subject: QS: PRONUNS AND ERGATIVITY Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I'm currently working on a larger project on what I call "Categorial Typology" with respect to East Causian languages (ELCs). The output will be (I hope) a series of seven volumes entitled "Person, Klasse, Kongruenz - Fragmente einer Kategorialtypologie des einfachen Satzes in den ostkaukasischen Sprachen" ("PKK", to appear at Lincom (Munich)). The theoretical framework of PKK (called "Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios" ("GSS") is documented in the first volume ("Die Grundlagen", due 1998,II)), the following volumes treat the morphosyntax of ECLs with respect to specific categorial components derived from this framework (see my homepage for more, in case you are interested in things like this (http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/pkk1.htm)). Now, the second volume (PKK II, to appear 1998,III) deals with aspects of expressing "person" in ECLs. In order to substantiate some typological generalizations concerning personal pronouns and ergative case marking, I still collect data on ergativily marked pronouns in languages other than ECLs. What concerns me most are the following questions: In case, "your" language knows an ABS/ERG dichotomy for persnal pronouns: a) Are certain "persons" exempted from the ABS/ERG-dichotomy, in case the language in question has such a dichotomy in its pronominal system? E.g., in ECLs we can observe the follwing "splits", among others) (1 = Sg1, 2 = Sg2, 4= Pl1, 5 = Pl2, I = inclusive, e = exclusive): ABS/ERG yes no 1, 2, 4e, 5 4e 1, 2 4i, 4e, 5 4i, 4e, 5 1, 2 1 the rest 1, 4i the rest 2 the rest b) Is there a specific pronominal ergative marker different from the nominal one, and (in case: yes) how is the distribution of this marker (markers) with respect to a)? c) If there is/are (a) special pronominal ergative, do you know anything about the grammaticalization path for each of them? d) In case nominal ergative markers appear, are there any restriction with respect to "person"? E.g., in some ECL nominal ergative morphemes ooccur only with plural pronouns (or vice versa). e) In case the ("your") language has mono- or polypersonal agreement on the verb: ea) Is pronominal ergativity matched by the pronominal clitics (cf. the famous case of Tsova-Tush (Holisky 1987). Thus, do some or all persons have a ABS/ERG dichotomy via agreement paralleled by the pronominal paradigms? Are specific persons exempted fromthis dichotomy (most liley the inclusive)? eb) Is the degree of categorial differentiation found in the pronominal paradigm reflected in the corresponding agreement system (in other words: Do you have as many morphologically marked "persons" on the verb as proposed by the pronomil paradigm) If not: Is the agreement system over/underdifferentiated, and how? f) Does the language in question have an ergativily marked reflexive pronoun? g) Do you know of any system of noun classification that is sensible for SAPs? Cf. the Kubachi (Dargwa, ECL) example: 4 nus:a d-axul-da we.ABS CM-go.PRÄS-non.Sg2 "We go." 5 u\s:a d-axul-da you.ABS CM-go.PRÄS-non.Sg2 "You go." but 6 it:e b-axul-sa-b they[+hum] CM[+hum,+pl]-go.PRÄS-AUX-CM[+hum,+pl] it:e d-axul-sa-d "They (the people) go." they[-hum] CM[-hum,+pl]-go.PRÄS-AUX-CM[-hum,+pl] "They (the animals) go." It would be very nice if you could provide me with some information concerning these questions (in case you have them, and in case you find the time to describe them). Maybe that I have already stored the data. But it might as well be that something relevant escaped my eyes. Any reference (e.g. see this or that language...) would be very helpful, too. Naturally, I'll post a summary of the problem on the list. Thank you very much for your cooparation, Wolfgang ==================================================== = Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze = = Institut für Allgemeine und Indogermanische = = Sprachwissenschaft + Universität München = = Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 = = D-80539 München = = Tel.: +89-21802486 (secr.) = = +89-21802485 = = http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ = ==================================================== From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Tue Feb 17 11:38:43 1998 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 12:38:43 +0100 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, J. Clancy Clements wrote: >I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented >response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and >gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > >Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... >because-of say these things my grandmother >"Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > >*Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... And Jon Aske: >I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that >bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is >interefering with my Spanish here. I fully agree with the asterisk. Looking for a functional explanation, Jon suggests: >Now, since the notion topic (as well as the notion focus) is not really >relevant to non-asserted clauses, it is not surprising that the subject is >not preverbal, since preverbal position is typically correlated with topics >in Spanish and postverbal position is associated with everything else. But the issue is that such preverbal subjects are never allowed, asserted or non-asserted: (i) *Mi abuela decir estas cosas... If we consider Aske's last example (ii) we see that _mi abuela_ is in preverbal position, although _unasserted_: (ii) Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. So, despite things being much more complex, the reason may be formal, what explains Clements' difficulties. I do not mean there is not a functional explanation (there is always, soon or later, a functional explanation if one looks for it); what I mean is that in this case, as has been traditionally observed, the imposibility of a infinitival preverbal subject relates to a formal aspect: agreement. So, subject-agreement (or in generative terms, abstract nominative case assignation) is what licenses the subject. If there is no agreement (as in Spanish infinitives) there is not preverbal (licensed) suject. If my starred example (i) is used in an embedded clause, the subject will _raise_ to preverbal position: (iii) He oido a mi abuela decir estas cosas... This phenomenon is conceived of (in formalist contexts) as _exceptional case marking_ (it is assumed that the objective (abstract?) case of the main verb licenses the subject, that then raises). Then, the reason for the postverbal position of the subject in (iv) (iv) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... could be related to the unability of the non-agreeing infinitive to assign nominative case (i.e., to license its subject). Of course, what matters here is that I think that this (incompletely presented and old) formal explanation is in no way incompatible with that suggested by Jon, but that they are complementary. In this way, formal restrictions ensure the _functional role_ an utterance has to play, what does not mean that these formal restrictions should be necessarily reductible to that discursive/perceptive function. In other words, agreement could be functionally motivated in human languages, but not (unless rather indirectly) the position of infinitive subjects. Saludos cordiales, and, please, excuse my net-spanglish. _______________________________ Dr. Jose-Luis Mendivil Linguistica General Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) From Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU Tue Feb 17 14:43:27 1998 From: Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:43:27 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: Hi, Jose-Luis, welcome to the discussion. On Tuesday, February 17, 1998 6:39 AM Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro wrote: > I fully agree with the asterisk. OK, it must be Basque Spanish then. > (ii) Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. > > So, despite things being much more complex, the reason may be formal, what > explains Clements' difficulties. I do not mean there is not a functional > explanation (there is always, soon or later, a functional explanation if > one looks for it) Wow! Well, that's good to know. However, your resorting to "abstract nominative case assignation" to explain the postverbal position of the subject of the POR construction is not something I can live with (it sounds like hocus pocus to me, what can I say). Of course, formalists are free to posit anything they want and then transform it into whatever they want, but I really don't see how that explains anything. To me, and I would think that to most functionalists, such formal constructs are just not real. I realize I am not going to convince you of this, but I just had to say it. > If my starred example (i) is used in an embedded clause, the subject will > _raise_ to preverbal position: > > (iii) He oido a mi abuela decir estas cosas... >>From my perspective, raising is not an explanation for anything. The "underlying" structure that you say (iii) above comes from, namely (iv) below, doesn't exist anywhere, as far as I can see. The dative in (iii) is nothing but a complement of OIR (which, by the way, explains why "a mi abuela" can come before the infinitive clause, or even after it), which indeed controls the infinitival complement. I cannot accept that the nominal constituent "(a) mi abuela" is ever physically part of the lower clause. (iv) He oido [a mi abuela decir estas cosas]... I hope I haven't shocked anybody on this list by saying this. On the other hand, it is clear that some sort of restructuring and reanalysis is possible in this construction, ie the lower clause's boundaries are somewhat porous, which is why you can get things like (v) (v) He oido decir a mi abuela estas cosas... But this happens in many Spanish constructions. You may say that the notion of "porous boundaries" is hocus pocus, but that is only if you believe that boundaries and structure has a formal reality which is divorced from the semantic and/or pragmatic forces which bind elements of constructions together. Best, Jon > _______________________________ > Dr. Jose-Luis Mendivil > Linguistica General > Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) > """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it. --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From macw at CMU.EDU Tue Feb 17 15:55:35 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 10:55:35 -0500 Subject: subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: To my extremely non-native ears, the problem with (1) is that there is a tendency to pull off "por mi abuela" as a separate phrase. This would then lead to a possible interpretation in which there is some other subject of "decir." In the case of (2) no such temptation arises. (1) *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas ... (2) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela ... In other words (1) could be parsed with a comma intonation after "abuela". I realize that this is not "para mi abuela", but still there are plenty of preposed "por + nominal" phrases in Spanish. Many more than would be possible in English, for example. It would seem to me that sticking with (2) is simply an excellent way of avoiding any garden paths in sentence interpretation. This seems to me like a straightforward functionalist account of this pattern. --Brian MacWhinney From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Tue Feb 17 16:02:08 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 10:02:08 -0600 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish Message-ID: A few more clarifications. When I suggested the existence of competition strategies to disambiguate double "a" constructions I did so in reference to Clancy´s crucial argument about deleting "a" in the context of DO/ IO coexistence. The crucial point was that "demoting" the IO to an oblique was the best way to avoid "a" repetition. Now, I am glad Clancy found the same type of reaction from native speakers about the naturalness of "Juan le presenta Luisa a Marta". Since Diego said that "> (1) sounds perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence" I thought there would be an interesting dialect contrast between Mexico and Spain vs Costa Rica. However I checked with Costa Rican friends at the University of Casta Rica and the example was rejected or seen as rather strange by everyone. Thus I Agree with Clancy in that we cannot trust overt NP´s and the interesting issue the is clitic LE. 2) I am quite happy that my clarification on "Visitar a Paris" generated a discussion of something I did not say. I did not say that the ONLY function of "a" was marking human objects, I just pointed out that in that example "Paris" would be read as affected by the process. I agree with Diego that once the definiteness of the object idea hit the ground everybody forgot about the basic human value of personal "a". Outdated as the unique explanation, I believe that the human object interpretation accounts for an important set of data. Indeed I believe that there is an important gradation going from designating a human definite object to signaling an definite non-human object. The cline is determined, I believe, by the semantics of the verb. Being that "visitar" has a strong requirement for human objects the use of "a" will strengthen that interpretation. Now, about Diego´s example > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... >> >Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does >not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of >(1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], >there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). I would like to know when was this written beacuse the racist interpretation may be in fact quite insightful. Recent analysis by Marcela Flores on LE/Lo contrast (there is a paper submitted to Romance Philology) where she proves that in Colonial Spanish there are important contrasts in which LO is in fact used to refer to people of lower status whereas LE is used for those in upper scales of Colonial society. Indians were referred by Spaniards, as we can all expect, with LO not with LE. Chances are Diego´s example could have the same or similar (racist) motivation. Let us not forget, as Jon pointed out, that LE and LA were already used at the time (and in some current dialects it still is) to mark social differences between males and females. The use of the LE/LO contrast to mark status differences is still exploited in all dialects of Spanish as we all know. The more formal the situation is the more LE tends to be used. So in: 1) Le esperamos 2) Lo esperamos 1) is prefered for formal situations (Radio transmission, wedding invitations and such). This is of course no news to anybody. Seminal work by Erica Garcia since 1975 has pointed out this basic contrast. Since the text cited by Diego is a hisotrical source maybe he can help us with more information about it. To prevent misunderstandings, I don´t believe it explains the whole grammaticalization process discussed by Jon and Diego. I only think this explanation adds an angle not previously considered in this discussion. Best regards to all of you. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From annes at HTDC.ORG Tue Feb 17 19:05:53 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:05:53 -1000 Subject: NLP AND THE BEST THEORY OF SYNTAX Message-ID: To the readers: On March 17th I will be giving a talk at the University of Hawaii's Linguistic Department Tuesday Seminar called, "The Best Theory of Syntax." In this talk I intend to make the rather non-controversial point that, the best theory of syntax must necessarily be the one that demonstrates itself to be most completely implemented in a programming language. I am writing to the group to ask for references, obscure or otherwise, where this basic proposition has been put forth before in the literature or through personal communications. Comments, criticism, and discussion of this argument are also welcome. I will post a summary of the references to the list. (Be sure and mention if you do not want your name mentioned in the summary). Some might argue that I am merely putting complex arguments into simple language but these arguments have substance and effect in either simple or complex langauge. This is especially true when we are dealing with the application of syntax to a multi-billion dollar industry such as NLP. More specifically, I intend to present the arguement that the best independent and objective measure of a theory of syntax' overall effectiveness is its ability to generate, in a computer program, standard grammatical structures and to manipulate these structures in the same way as users of the language being described. That is, I intend to argue that the best theory of syntax is the one that produces the best parsers. Following that I will present a very ordinary set of standards for the evaluation of parsers and then based on the comparison of theories using those standards, I will argue that the theory of syntax that underlies the Ergo Linguistic Technologies' parser is the best theory of syntax and that all others should be relegated to the scrap heap of "wannabe" theories until such time as they can produce equal or better parsers. The logic that I will present to support this is: 1) if there is ever to be a way to determine which of the competing, extant theories of syntax is preferable to the others, there must be an independent and objective means of weighing the relative value and completeness of these theories in terms of their ability to accomplish the tasks they were originally designed for. Specifically, there must be an independent and objective means of verifying which theories are indeed most capable of expressing all and only those generalizations about language that describe and explain the observed facts of their structure. 2) since computers have the ability to represent and execute binary algorithms, any theory that is composed of binary algorithms should be able to be implemented in a programming language. Thus, any theory of syntax that has reached a level of maturity should be able to represent its generalizations in working parsers. In fact all programming languages and compilers are based on early syntactic discoveries like phrase structure rules and Noam Chomsky is the default reference for much of the early work, and have already demonstrated their aptness for this sort of comparison. 3) the degree to which a theory of syntax and its algorithms cannot be implemented in a programming language is the degree to which that theory and its algorithms have not been completely or correctly worked out and should not be considered a mature enough theory to be included in the discussion of which theory is to be preferred. 4) the theory which is most thoroughly worked out will naturally have the most thorough and comprehensive parsing programs associated with it, and for that reason is to be considered the best theory of syntax as determined by this independent, objective criteria. I will also propose a method for judging which theories have been "best" implemented in a programming language. Specifically, I will argue that the standards described below are the minimum standards that a theory of syntax would have to parse in order to be able say that it had reached some level of maturity and also this same set of criteria would be used to determine exactly which theories of syntax had most effectively accomplished the task of modeling the mechanisms that generate all and only the sentences of a language. In addition, the comparison of individual parses will of course use the Penn Treebank II guidelines established by the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, any theory of syntax, whatever its assumptions and methods, should be able to translate its structures into the Penn Treebank style if their work is thorough and complete. The ability to generate these labeled brackets and trees in itself constitutes a good test of a theories maturity. The motivation for such comparisons and standards is of course to provide an independent and objective means of evaluation of the merits and relative success of research in this area that can be judged and discussed not only by those with a particular theoretical orientation, but also by those with different theoretical backgrounds, those in different areas of linguistics, and of course those from fields outside of linguistics who need to evaluate and discuss such materials. THE STANDARDS: In addition to using the Penn Treebank II guidelines for the generation of trees and labeled brackets and a dictionary that is at least 35,000 words in size and works in real time and handles sentences up to 15 to 20 words in length, we suggest that NLP parsers should also meet standards in the following seven areas before being considered "complete." The seven areas are: 1) the structural analysis of strings, 2) the evaluation of acceptable strings, 3) the manipulation of strings, 4) question/answer, statement/response repartee, 5) command and control, 6) the recognition of the essential identity of ambiguous structures, and 7) lexicography. (These same criteria have been proposed for the coordination of animations with NLP with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language Consortium--a consortium (whose standards were recently accepted by the ISO) designed to standardize 3D environments. (See http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/NLP- ANIM). It is important to recognize that EAGLES and the MUC conferences, groups that are charged with the responsibility of developing standards for NLP do not mention any of the following criteria and instead limit themselves to largely general characteristics of user acceptance or vague categories such as "rejects ungrammatical input" rather than specific proposals detailed in terms of syntactic and grammatical structures and functions that are to be rejected or accepted. The EAGLES site is made up of hundreds of pages of introductory material that is very confusing and difficult to navigate; however, once you actually find the few standards that are being proposed you will find that they do not come close to the level of precision and depth that is being proposed here and for that reason should be rejected until such time as these higher and more demanding levels of expectation of the NLP systems is included there as well. These are serious matters and a group like EAGLES should not ignore extant NLP tools simply because they are not mainstream or because mainstream parsers cannot meet these requirements (evnthough the Ergo parser is better known than almost all other parsers). Just go through their pages and try to find EXACTLY what a parser is expected to do under these guidelines. There is almost no reference to specific grammatical structures, the Penn Treebank II guidelines, or references to current working parsers as models (http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES/home.html). If the EAGLES' standards are ever to gain any credibility and respect they are going to have to be far more specific about grammatical and syntactic phenomena that a system can and cannot support. There should also be some requirement that the systems being judged offer a demonstration of their abilities to generate labeled brackets and trees in the style of the Penn Treebank II guidelines. I suggest the following as a far more exacting and far more demanding test of systems than is offered by EAGLES or any of the MUC conferences. HERE IS A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF STANDARDS IN THOSE SEVEN AREAS: 1. At a minimum, from the point of view of the STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF STRINGS, the parser should:, 1) identify parts of speech, 2) identify parts of sentence, 3) identify internal clauses (what they are and what their role in the sentence is as well as the parts of speech, parts of sentence and so on of these internal clauses), 4) identify sentence type (without using punctuation), 5) identify tense and voice in main and internal clauses, and 6) do 1-5 for internal clauses. 2. At a minimum from the point of view of EVALUATION OF STRINGS, the parser should: 1) recognize acceptable strings, 2) reject unacceptable strings, 3) give the number of correct parses identified, 4) identify what sort of items succeeded (e.g. sentences, noun phrases, adjective phrases, etc), 5) give the number of unacceptable parses that were tried, and 6) give the exact time of the parse in seconds. 3. At a minimum, from the point of view of MANIPULATION OF STRINGS, the parser should: 1) change yes/no and information questions to statements and statements to yes/no and information questions, 2) change actives to passives in statements and questions and change passives to actives in statements and questions, and 3) change tense in statements and questions. 4. At a minimum, based on the above basic set of abilities, any such device should also, from the point of view of QUESTION/ANSWER, STATEMENT/RESPONSE REPARTEE, he parser should: 1) identify whether a string is a yes/no question, wh-word question, command or statement, 2) identify tense (and recognize which tenses would provide appropriate responses, 3) identify relevant parts of sentence in the question or statement and match them with the needed relevant parts in text or databases, 4) return the appropriate response as well as any sound or graphics or other files that are associated with it, and 5) recognize the essential identity between structurally ambiguous sentences (e.g. recognize that either "John was arrested by the police" or "The police arrested John" are appropriate responses to either, "Was John arrested (by the police)" or "Did the police arrest John?"). 5. At a minimum from the point of view of RECOGNITION OF THE ESSENTIAL IDENTITY OF AMBIGUOUS STRUCTURES, the parser should recognize and associate structures such as the following: 1) existential "there" sentences with their non-there counterparts (e.g. "There is a dog on the porch," "A dog is on the porch"), 2) passives and actives, 3) questions and related statements (e.g. "What did John give Mary" can be identified with "John gave Mary a book."), 4) Possessives should be recognized in three forms, "John's house is big," "The house of John is big," "The house that John has is big," 5) heads of phrases should be recognized as the same in non-modified and modified versions ("the tall thin man in the office," "the man in the office," the tall man in the office" and the tall thin man in the office" should be recognized as referring to the same man (assuming the text does not include a discussion of another, "short man" or "fat man" in which case the parser should request further information when asked simply about "the man")), and 6) others to be decided by the group. 6. At a minimum from the point of view of COMMAND AND CONTROL, the parser should: 1) recognize commands, 2) recognize the difference between commands for the operating system and commands for characters or objects, and 3) recognize the relevant parts of the commands in order to respond appropriately. 7. At a minimum from the point of view of LEXICOGRAPHY, the parser should: 1) have a minimum of 50,000 words, 2) recognize single and multi-word lexical items, 3) recognize a variety of grammatical features such as singular/plural, person, and so on, 4) recognize a variety of semantic features such as +/-human, +/-jewelry and so on, 5) have tools that facilitate the addition and deletion of lexical entries, 6) have a core vocabulary that is suitable to a wide variety of applications, 7) be extensible to 75,000 words for more complex applications, and 8) be able to mark and link synonyms. THE CONCLUSIONS I WILL DRAW FROM THIS ARE: 1) the theory that underlies the software at Ergo Linguistic Technologies is not only the best theory of syntax, but is the ONLY theory of syntax that has reached a sufficiently developed state to even attempt the standards described here. 2) those who do not mention this theory in their research proposals, grant applications, publications and so on are guilty of negligence (and could be sued if there are grants, contracts, jobs, or other such items of material value at stake and where the offerer of these jobs, grants, etc has reason to expect that the applicant is an expert in his field and is providing an accurate picture of the competitive environment). In addition, computational linguistics departments who do not mention these tools or use tools of this calibre are remiss in their duty to present the full range of available materials to their students. 3) All current theories of syntax such as Chomsky's latest or even older versions of his theory HPSG, LFG, etc. should all be relegated to the scrap heap of "wannabe" systems until such time as they have been worked out in sufficient detail to allow the creation of programs that can execute their algorithms to the degree required by the above standards. (I do not want to imply that the use of these theories to analyze the worlds' languages cannot or has not contributed greatly to the store of knowledge about the nature of the world's langauges. As a matter of fact the theory that we are working with owes a tremendous debt to all the work that has come before it in the form of these earlier theories. The only problem is that these other theories have not yet completed their basic research and have not yet reached a level of sufficient maturity to work with the standards described above and for that reason can only be considered works in progress or "wannabe" theories.) I will finish my UH talk with a demonstration of the software that has been developed from our theory of syntax focusing on demonstrations from the seven standards described above and handouts from the output of other parsers. In addition to our standard demo as seen on our web site http://www.ergo-ling.com), I will use the tools called "The BracketDoctor" (a device that generates labeled brackets and trees in the style of the Penn Treebank II guidelines) "The English Sentence Enhancer" (an ESL grammar checker) "The Logic Doctor" (a program that handles first order predicate calculus, syllogistic reasoning, inferrencing and basic logic) and "The Q&A Demo" ( a program that shows our ability to handle question/answer, statement/response repartee) to demonstrate our strengths using the Penn Treebank II style trees and labeled brackets as well as practical illustrations to demonstrate the abilities of our theory of syntax in those seven areas. (All these tools except the "Logic Doctor" and the "Q&A Demo" are available for free download from our web site at http://www.ergo-ling.com or by email by writing me at bralich at hawaii.edu. These are Windows 95 programs that fit on one disk and can be installed with a standard setup function from WIN95.) Please be advised that these programs are copyrighted and patent pending. In sum, I would like to know of references and to receive comments in support of or against the following argument: 1) that computers are the ideal devices for comparing different theories' abilities to model the phenomena they seek to describe (all and only the grammatical sentences of a languga); 2) that any theory that can not be fully implemented in a programming language as described in the standards outlined above, is flawed in some way; and 3) that the best independent and objective measure of a theories scope, efficiency, and effectiveness is the degree to which it can be implemented in a programming language. (Of course, the basis for judgement will be the Penn Treebank II guidelines and the standards described above). Then based on the ability of the Ergo Linguistic's tools to compete in all the standards, I suggest that the theories of Brame, Chomsky, Kaplan and Bresnen, Pollard and Sag, Starosta, et al be set aside until such time as they can be shown to generate programs that are as good or better than those produced at Ergo Linguistic Technologies' offices. Phil Bralich P.S. We recommend that you download these tools and take them with you (on a lap top is best of course) to any linguistics, NLP, Computational Linguistics, MT, or logic conference or workshop that will discuss work in these areas. It should provide you with an interesting source of comparison material as well as with some interesting and challenging questions for the presenters. Of course, this may also be of value for students in their classes. Linguistics and Computer Science departments that are currently not committed to any particular theory of syntax or approach might want to consider collaborative involvements with this theory as a means of producing commercially viable products and as a source of research grants. You may also wish to compare results in published reports with results that these tools provide. You may also want to email copies of one or more of these tools to classmates, teachers, and co-workers (please avoid sending them to competitors like a big bunch of unordered pizzas). P.P.S. As the field of linguistics is dominated by very intelligent, very informed individuals who are also quite competitive, you can measure the success of this argument on the field overall by the reactions of the readers to this post--the smaller the response, the higher the acceptance (begrudging though it may be). That is, people are certainly willing to criticize any argument they can, but they merely keep quiet if they cannot. Praise for a competitor's arguments is not likely. Thus, a lack of criticism should be interpreted as acceptance of these arguments. Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From gallego at UVIGO.ES Tue Feb 17 19:14:50 1998 From: gallego at UVIGO.ES (Jose M. Garcia.Miguel) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 20:14:50 +0100 Subject: Ergativity & Chibchan Message-ID: Diego Quesada escribió: > Now, given that most Chibchan > languages are highly "discourse-run" (...), which means that marking of > categories is > intermittenty, applied only when needed, the presence/absence of "erg" in > Bribri (and in its closest relative, Cabecar) -and to a lesser degree in > Guatuso- depends, as you correctly suspect, on discourse-pragmatic > aspects. > The point is that just like ergative marking correlates with low animacy and/or low definiteness of NPs in split-ergative systems, I suspect that optional ergative marking in A NP correlates with low topicality or new information in some Chibchan languages (and, probably, in other languages). Does anybody know of other languages in which variable ergative marking directly correlates with discourse factors? Do they support / reject such a correlation? Saludos -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jose M. Garcia-Miguel Linguistica Xeral Departamento de Traduccion, Linguistica e Teoria da Literatura Tfno: +34 86 812355 - Universidade de Vigo Fax: +34 86 812380 - Aptdo. 874 correo-e: gallego at uvigo.es - E-36201 VIGO ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 20:47:53 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 15:47:53 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802171602.KAA17343@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I will merely clarify two things: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Ricardo Maldonado wrote: > Now, I am glad Clancy found the same type of reaction from native speakers > about the naturalness of > "Juan le presenta Luisa a Marta". Since Diego said that "> (1) sounds > perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence" I > thought there would be an interesting dialect contrast between Mexico and > Spain vs Costa Rica. However I checked with Costa Rican friends at the > University of Casta Rica and the example was rejected or seen as rather > strange by everyone. The example (1) that sounded- -and still sounds- perfectly natural to me is not the one from Clancy: "Juan le..." but rather the one below: > Now, about Diego�s example > > > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... Yes, this one. > >Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does > >not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of > >(1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], > >there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). > > I would like to know when was this written beacuse the racist interpretation > may be in fact quite insightful. Recent analysis by Marcela Flores on LE/Lo > contrast (there is a paper submitted to Romance Philology) where she proves > that in Colonial Spanish there are important contrasts in which LO is in > fact used to refer to people of lower status whereas LE is used for those in > upper scales of Colonial society. Indians were referred by Spaniards, as we > can all expect, with LO not with LE. Chances are Diego�s example could have > the same or similar (racist) motivation. The text was written in 1993 by Elizabeth Fonseca, a CR historian very much against the abuses of the conquista, so the racist explanation is N/A. > Since the text > cited by Diego is a hisotrical source maybe he can help us with more > information about it. See above. Saludos, Diego From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 22:55:24 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 17:55:24 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: <199802170349.TAA22306@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > Hi, again, > > On Monday, February 16, 1998 9:30 PM J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) said: > > > I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented > > response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and > > gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > > > > Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... > > because-of say these things my grandmother > > "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > > > > *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... > > First of all I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that > bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is > interefering with my Spanish here. My black-box agrees with Jon's assessment of the preinfinitival subject. I hear things like this all the time (1) Por vos andar de hocicon ahora... (2) Por Juan estar de guardia ese dia... In the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean places, one hears (3) Para yo saber que tu dices (4) Para tu decirme si esta bien. Diego From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 22:59:04 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 17:59:04 -0500 Subject: subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: <19309594.3096701735@jubilation.psy.cmu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > To my extremely non-native ears, the problem with (1) is that there is a > tendency to pull off "por mi abuela" as a separate phrase. This would then > lead to a possible interpretation in which there is some other subject of > "decir." In the case of (2) no such temptation arises. > > (1) *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas ... > (2) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela ... > > In other words (1) could be parsed with a comma intonation after "abuela". > I realize that this is not "para mi abuela", but still there are plenty of > preposed "por + nominal" phrases in Spanish. Many more than would be > possible in English, for example. In none of the four (and many more) cases I provided in a previous message (two with 'por' and two with 'para' is there the least sign of a pause. Hence, the explanation falls short here. Diego From clements at INDIANA.EDU Wed Feb 18 01:20:36 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 20:20:36 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Diego Quesada wrote: > My black-box agrees with Jon's assessment of the preinfinitival > subject. I hear things like this all the time > > (1) Por vos andar de hocicon ahora... > > (2) Por Juan estar de guardia ese dia... > > In the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean places, one hears > > (3) Para yo saber que tu dices > > (4) Para tu decirme si esta bien. Caribbean Spanish allows this. Correct. Castilian Spanish allows it marginally. For example, Diego's (2) and (4) are bad in CS, whereas (3) is somewhat better. The following varieties allow it marginally: Mexican (non-Caribbean), Argentinan, Chilean. I'm not sure about Peruvian, Bolivian, etc. The question can now be recast: what functional explanation can there be for the more unrestricted presence of it in some dialects, and the marginal presence of it in other dialects? Note: the presence of it in CS and other varieties seems to have to do with the realization of the subject: if it's a full NP, it's worse, if it's a pronoun, it's not as bad. This is a GENERAL characterization, which for a functional analysis is not helpful because it's not possible to see how things function in a general characterization of a phenomenon. Still, if anyone has an idea, functionally, why some varieties tend to disallow it and other varieties allow it, I really like to hear it. Thanks in advance (and to Brian M. for his response). Clancy From Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU Wed Feb 18 03:41:10 1998 From: Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 22:41:10 -0500 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: On Monday, February 16, 1998 5:07 PM, J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) wrote: > This whole discussion started by my talking about ergative-type patterns > in Spanish. I agree that Spanish is not an ergative language. I think, > however, that there are suggestions of ergative-like patterns in the order > of intrans. clause subjects and trans. clause objects. Also, there seems > to be a move toward ergative patterning in pronominalization. In the big > picture, Spanish may be moving toward such an ergative pattern, which at > one point could become grammaticalized. The grammaticalization of > discourse phenomena is not that uncommon. (Cf. the grammaticalization of > preposing/posposing rules in VO --> OV shift for example). Clancy, I hope I'm not being too persistent, but I am just trying to understand your position and to find out what I may be missing: I think that even if we wanted to call this weak ordering correlation between S and O ergative (which I wouldn't want to, for reasons I already tried to explain), as far as I know, no language has ever developed grammatical ergativity from such a pattern. (Also, as far as I know, grammatical ergative coding is never manifested as a word order pattern, but as case marking or verbal correferencing. Perhaps I'm wrong.) In other words, I have not heard before of a language grammaticalizing this type of ordering pattern, so that it results in all, or most, S constituents become postverbal--thus patterning with the O's--while the A's remain preverbal. I have not heard of grammatical(ized) ergativity arising that way and I don't think it's possible either, for the simple reason that this correlation has a clear functional basis (focus position) of a kind that doesn't seem to be easily obscured or extended (reanalyzed). Also, I still don't understand why the fact that human accusatives are coded like datives in Spanish is a reflection of ergative patterning. Thanks, Jon PS I am familiar with DuBois' claims that the absolutive is typically the overt argument in narrative in some (grammatically ergative) languages, but I have not been able to duplicate those results in any language that I mostly work on (Basque, English, Spanish), so I remain skeptical about the generality of this finding, and in particular about this property (being coded by a full nominal) being the source of grammatical ergativity. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. --Plato From holton at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU Sun Feb 22 01:15:41 1998 From: holton at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Gary Holton) Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998 17:15:41 -0800 Subject: Second Call: Santa Barbara WAIL Message-ID: **** CALL FOR PAPERS **** Workshop on American Indigenous Languages Santa Barbara, CA May 9-10, 1998 The linguistics department at the University or California, Santa Barbara issues a call for papers to be presented at its first annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL). The workshop will be a forum for the discussion of theoretical and descriptive linguistic studies of indigenous languages of the Americas. The workshop will take place on Saturday and Sunday May 9-10, 1998 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our invited speakers will be Nicola Bessell, Wallace Chafe, and Marianne Mithun. Dr. Bessell has worked extensively on the phonetics/phonology interface in Coeur d'Alene Salish. Dr. Chafe's current research involves documentation of the Seneca and Caddo languages. He is also writing a popular book on the importance of Native American languages. Dr. Mithun has just completed a book on the Languages of North America for the green series put out by Cambridge University Press. Anonymous abstracts are invited for talks on any topic in linguistics. Talks will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Individuals may submit abstracts for one single and one co-authored paper. Abstracts should be one page with a 500 word limit. A separate page for data and references may be included, if necessary. Abstracts may be submitted in hardcopy or by email. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is March 15, 1998. For hardcopy submittal, please send four copies of your anonymous one-page abstract. In the envelope, include a 3x5 card with the following information: a. name b. affiliation c. mailing address d. phone number e. e-mail address f. title of your paper Hardcopy abstracts should be mailed to: Workshop on American Indigenous Languages Department of Linguistics University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Email submissions are encouraged. To submit an abstract by email, the information that would be included on the 3x5 card should be in the body of the email message, with the anonymous abstract sent as an attachment. Email abstracts should be sent to: wail at humanitas.ucsb.edu DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: March 15, 1998 Notification of acceptance will be by email in mid-March. General Information Santa Barbara is situated on the Pacific Ocean near the Santa Ynez mountains. The UCSB campus is located near the Santa Barbara airport, and is approximately 90 miles north of LAX airport in Los Angeles. Shuttle buses run from LAX to Santa Barbara several times each day. Information about hotel accomodations will be provided on request. Crash space for participants may be available with graduate students in the UCSB linguistics department for those who arrange early. WAIL is co-sponsored by the UCSB linguistics department and the department's Native American Indian Languages (NAIL) study group, which has been meeting regularly in Santa Barbara since 1990, providing a forum for the discussion of issues relating to Native American language and culture. For further information contact the conference coordinator at wail at humanitas.ucsb.edu or (805) 893-3776. From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Fri Feb 20 22:18:02 1998 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Payne) Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 14:18:02 -0800 Subject: Lexicography Workshop Message-ID: The Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oregon, as part of its regular offerings, will be sponsoring a lexicography workshop from 23 June to 14 August, 1998. The workshop will be led by Valentin Vydrine, of the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia. Dr. Vydrine is a specialist in the lexicography of West Africa, and is corrently compiling a massive comparative dictionary of the Manding languages. This workshop will be designed for all linguistic and anthropological fieldworkers who are in the process of preparing a dictionary of an underdescribed language. Oregon SIL also offers a variety of graduate and undergraduate level courses in field-oriented linguistics, including a "Workshop in Grammatical Description." For more information on the workshops and other offerings of the Summer Institute of Linguistics at Oregon, please check out our web page at http://www.sil.org/schools/oregon/oregon.html or contact Tom Payne (tpayne at oregon.uoregon.edu) Thank you. _____________________________________________________________________ Thomas E. Payne, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA Voice: 541 342-6706. Fax: 541 346-3917 ______________________________________________________________________ From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Tue Feb 24 09:37:43 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 11:37:43 +0200 Subject: No subject Message-ID: To who may have the information I'm looking for, (1) I read an article by John Hinds once called (I think) `Paragraph structure and pronominalization' (or something like that) but I can't remember where and I don't seem to have any copies of it any more. Does anyone out there know where this article was published? (2) Could anyone please tell me Robert King's email address? Thanks very much. John Myhill From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Thu Feb 26 10:01:07 1998 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 11:01:07 +0100 Subject: Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics (Update) Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I would like to inform you all that an updated version of my Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics is now available at: http://wwwlet.leidenuniv.nl/www.let.data/gltc/michel/bgl.html With regards, Michel Buijs |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands Phone: +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 Fax: +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 E-mail: mbuijs at rullet.leidenuniv.nl |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH Sat Feb 28 06:21:32 1998 From: yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH (Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong) Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 13:21:32 +0700 Subject: John Hinds' artcicle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, John Myhill wrote: > To who may have the information I'm looking for, > (1) I read an article by John Hinds once called (I think) `Paragraph > structure and pronominalization' (or something like that) but I can't > remember where and I don't seem to have any copies of it any more. Does > anyone out there know where this article was published? References of 3 works by John Hinds that I know of: 1) Conversational structure: An Investigation based on Japanese interview discourse in John Hinds & I howard (eds), problems in Japanese Syntax and semantics. Tokyo 1978 2) Aspects of Japanese Discourse Stucture. Tokyo 1976. 3) Conversational Interaction in Central Thai. 1992. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Language and Linguistics. Thammasat University, thailand. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Yuphaphann "Yui" Hoonchamlong yui at alpha.tu.ac.th Dept. of Linguistics yui at ipied.tu.ac.th Thammasat University http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/yui/ Bangkok, Thailand Thai Language Audio resource Center http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/ From dp11 at CORNELL.EDU Sun Feb 1 20:15:11 1998 From: dp11 at CORNELL.EDU (David Parkinson) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 16:15:11 -0400 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Hi Funknetters: Some of us here at Cornell are having a seminar on ergativity, and the question came up about whether anyone has ever carried out research to see whether ergativity correlates with any other aspects of linguistic structure (word order, head vs. dependent marking, presence of antipassive). Something like Dryer's or Nichols' research would be nice, but even something on a less sweeping scale. Anyone know of anything like this? There are reports in the literature such as "ergative" languages tending to have verb-initial or verb-final order, but has this ever been rigorously tested? Also, does anyone know if there has been work done on the somewhat strange status of ergativity vis-a-vis accusativity? For example, it is often said that while languages exist whose sole means of marking grammatical relations is accusative patterning, no language exists whose sole means is ergative patterning. Also, what are unified subject properties in "accusative" languages often split in "ergative" languages between grammatical subject (i.e., final 1, uniting Dixon's S and A: e.g., reflexive antecedence, equi deletion) and absolutive case (uniting Dixon's S and O: e.g., relative extraction). It may be accusativocentric to see the split from the point of view of a unified category in "accusative" languages, where it may be more appropriate to see them as a collection of properties which coincide in "accusative" languages and split for principled reasons in "ergative" languages (i.e., Manning 1996). But why should a language not exhibit ergative properties everywhere? And why should subject properties split in the way they do? Any help appreciated. David Parkinson dp11 at cornell.edu P.S. I am using scare quotes on the terms "ergative" and "accusative" language, since it is often a misnomer to identify a language as one or the other. From bates at CRL.UCSD.EDU Sun Feb 1 21:24:13 1998 From: bates at CRL.UCSD.EDU (Elizabeth Bates) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 13:24:13 -0800 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Michael Silverstein at the University of Chicago did quite a big of work on the ergative/accusative continuum back in the 1970's that might be useful to your inquiry, if you aren't already familiar with it. -liz bates From clements at INDIANA.EDU Mon Feb 2 01:21:47 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 20:21:47 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, David Parkinson wrote: > Some of us here at Cornell are having a seminar on ergativity, and > the question came up about whether anyone has ever carried out research to > see whether ergativity correlates with any other aspects of linguistic > structure (word order, head vs. dependent marking, presence of > antipassive). Something like Dryer's or Nichols' research would be nice, > but even something on a less sweeping scale. Anyone know of anything like > this? There are reports in the literature such as "ergative" languages > tending to have verb-initial or verb-final order, but has this ever been > rigorously tested? Dryer's 1986 "primary objects, secondary objects, and antidative" (Language 62:808-45) is really good, I think. A side note about the correlation between discourse and ergative-type marking: In Spanish, there are what I call "ergativity effects". For example, the default order of intransitive clause subjects and transitive clause direct objects is postverbal. It turns out that this is grounded in discourse: topics are preverbal, focus elements are postverbal. It could be that discourse considerations underlie ergative marking in other languages as well. I'd be glad to give you a reference if you're interested. Clancy Clements From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Feb 2 02:30:26 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 21:30:26 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > In Spanish, there are what I call "ergativity effects". For example, the > default order of intransitive clause subjects and transitive clause > direct objects is postverbal. It turns out that this is grounded in > discourse: topics are preverbal, focus elements are postverbal. It could I'm not sure that I would call the Spanish phenomenon you describe "ergativity effects". Spanish intransitive subjects are more often than not topics and not foci. And when they are foci they can also be preverbal (F1 position) as well as postverbal (F2 position) or rheme-final (F3 position) (the same thing applies to transitive subjects). It is true that overt intransitive subjects are about as often foci as they are topics and thus there is a high percentage of overt intransitive subjects that are postverbal, especially with some intransitive subject arguments with certain semantic characteristics ("roles"). Ergative subjects can also be foci, just less frequently than absolutive subjects. This is for two reasons: 1) objects are typically better focus candidates than (transitive) subjects; and 2) transitive propositions make poor thetic (topicless) assertions. Thus most transitive subjects that are foci are "contrastive foci" and not "new foci". I am sure that you are aware of this complexity, but I am afraid that simplifying this picture by saying that Spanish displays "ergativity effects" may lead to more confusion than illumination. Going back to the original question, correlations between grammatical categories and other properties of language can be found by looking at the functional source of the grammatical categories and then seeing what those functional properties correlate with and why. In other words, we must look at the non-grammatical source of grammatical categories in semantics and, especially, information structure (discourse pragmatics). As many have argued before, I believe that the category subject, or nominative, is a grammaticalization of the ubiquitous informational category topic. Transitive and intransitive subjects are the default topics for a predicate (most topical arguments in the abstract). The category absolutive, on the other hand is not as well motivated a category. Overt (full nominal) objects are often foci, but not so highly accessible ones (unless they are contrastive). And overt intransitive subjects are foci about half of the time and topics the other half. Then, of course, there are the semantic affinities between O's and S's, most clearly evidenced in causativization and anti-causativization constructions, for instance (e.g. transitive vs. intransitive "boil"), in which the S of the non-causative predicate is the O of the causative version. So how and why do the absolutive and ergative categories arise? It seems that it happens by the reinterpretation of certain constructions in which a "patient" acts as an S (e.g. passive constructions). Such constructions are then reanalyzed, presumably to take advantage of the newly acquired argument coding morphology (cf. e.g. Myhill 1992, Typological discourse analysis). This is probably also facilitated by the informational and semantic (weak) correlations, or affinities, between S and O arguments. >>From this picture we can ascertain, or begin to look for, correlations between grammaticalized ergative and absolutive categories and other characteristics of a language. For instance, we may ask: what kind of languages use passive constructions and in what contexts? Is seems that rigid word order languages often use passives, since languages with free word order achieve the same effects by simply rearranging the topic and focus arguments. And passives are often used with perfective aspect, since in such assertions the topicality of the patient is increased and thus patients are more likely to be the topic of the assertion (note, however, that passive can also be used in a language such as English to place a patient in F1 (preverbal) focus position, whereas a more flexible order language, such as Spanish would just place the object in F1 position without changing its grammatical relation or the basic construction. Anyway, I'm getting carried away again. Sorry about that. I just wanted to clear up some potential misunderstandings. Jon From Valerie.Ross at COLORADO.EDU Mon Feb 2 03:43:06 1998 From: Valerie.Ross at COLORADO.EDU (ROSS VALERIE SUZANNE) Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 20:43:06 -0700 Subject: E-Mail list Message-ID: Could you please take me off of your e-mail list. I do not know how I even began receicving mail from you when I did not sign up asking for information. I would appreciate it if you would erase my name so I stop receiving your mail. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Mon Feb 2 08:01:49 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 10:01:49 +0200 Subject: ergativity arising Message-ID: I am vaguely developing a theory about ergativity and word order based on observations from Austronesian languages (though I'm aware of the (correct) typological observations about ergativity being associated with verb-final and verb-initial order. As I think most of you functionalists know, the Austronesian languages as a group sort of hover between ergativity and accusativity, with some more in one direction, others more in the other direction, and others who knows where in between. Basically, they (all?) have some kind of construction with ergative/passive morphology (e.g. direct object like intransitive subject, transitive subject different but occurring much more frequently than, e.g. the English passive. In some Austronesian languages, this `ergative-passive' construction is statistically preponderant, and these languages are popularly considered `ergative' (e.g. Samoan, and I think it's acceptable to analyze Philippine languages like Tagalog this way these days, e.g. Cooreman Fox & Givon in Studies in Language 1988 I think it was), while in others the `ergative-passive' construction is much less common. It turns out that in Javanese, the ergative-passive construction (with the prefix di-) occurs about 25% of the time (see my article in SIL), while in Indonesian the cognate construction occurs about 40% of the time, while in Cebuano the `goal focus' ergative-passive construction occurs about 50% of the time and in Tagalog it's about 67% of the time (I think I'm remembering these numbers about right--Matt Shibatani reported the last two, if I remember correctly). This correlates with the degree of word-order flexibility in these languages. Javanese is the most strongly Actor-Verb-Patient (SVO if you want to use these terms, but they aren't appropriate)--the `ergative-passive' construction in Javanese HAS TO be Patient-Verb, like a more normal English-type passive construction. On the other hand, Indonesian is more flexible--the Patient in the ergative-passive construction can go either before or after the verb (and is usually after), and it is comparatively more common than in Javanese. On the other hand, Indonesian CANNOT normally have both the Agent AND the Patient after the verb in this construction (actually I have found a single example of this, but this is out of several hundred tokens)--so Indonesian word order is still restricted. On the other hand, Tagalog and Cebuano freely allow Verb-Agent-Patient or Verb-Patient-Agent constructions with their ergative-passive construction, which is correspondingly much more common. So, what this means is that as we go from the verb-medial Javanese to the generally verb-initial Philippine languages, the frequency of the ergative-passive construction goes up and up and the language gets `more ergative.' For example, there are di-constructions in Indonesian with postverbal patients which could not be translated into Javanese with the di-construction but rather has to use the `active' construction. Here's a clear pair: INDONESIAN Dengan sigap disambarnya kayu ela... with quick seize yardstick `Quickly, he seized a yardstick...' (Suman 1978:161) JAVANESE Gage wae deweke ndudut kacune... quickly she pull-out her-handkerchief `Quickly, she pulled out her handkerchief...' (Brata 1979:167-8) In both languages, the di- construction is normally used for temporally sequenced transitive verbs (I think Paul Hopper first made this observation about Indonesian), and in both languages the Patient can only go before the verb if it has some special discourse salience. But since Javanese does not allow postverbal Patients in the di- construction, this means that if the Patient does not have any special discourse salience, the di- construction cannot be used, even if the clause is temporally sequenced--neither `kayu ela' nor `kayune' have any special discourse salience and so must be postverbal, but this does not stop Indonesian from using its di- (passive-ergative) construction, which can take a postverbal patient, but this DOES stop Javanese from using ITS di- construction, which CANNOT take a postverbal patient. This clearly shows how word order is related to the frequency of a passive-ergative construction. And I bet we could find similar pairs in Indonesian as opposed to Tagalog, where the passive-ergative construction can only be used in Tagalog because it has even more word order flexibility than Indonesian. This suggests that ergativity arises (in some situations) as a verb-medial language gets more flexible verb-initial order, or, correspondingly, an ergative VSO/VOS language can becomes nominative-accusative as it switches to more rigid SVO order. John Myhill From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 3 02:23:22 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 21:23:22 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: <199802020231.SAA14036@iceland.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 1 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > I'm not sure that I would call the Spanish phenomenon you describe > "ergativity effects". Spanish intransitive subjects are more often than not > topics and not foci. And when they are foci they can also be preverbal (F1 > position) as well as postverbal (F2 position) or rheme-final (F3 position) > (the same thing applies to transitive subjects). It is true that overt > intransitive subjects are about as often foci as they are topics and thus > there is a high percentage of overt intransitive subjects that are > postverbal, especially with some intransitive subject arguments with certain > semantic characteristics ("roles"). At least one test I know of may suggest that there is a certain ergative-like effect in the distribution of subjects in Spanish. Bare plural subjects can only appear as foci, never as topics. So, of all the possible candidates for subjects, all can appear postverbally, but not all preverbally. Casielles, in the 1996 LSRL selected papers volume (ed. Claudia Parodi et al.), talks about this within a formal semantics framework. And of course, the default position for objects is immediately after the verb. However, Jon Aske is right in saying that the term "ergative effect" is a simplification of a complex phenomenon in Spanish. The point is, however, that discourse considerations account for this ergative-like distribution of subjects in Spanish, though stricto senso we don't have a case of bona fide ergative-absolutive marking here. BUT in the marking of DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. Clancy Clements Indiana U. From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Feb 3 03:39:05 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 22:39:05 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clancy, I'm not sure I follow you here. > At least one test I know of may suggest that there is a certain > ergative-like effect in the distribution of subjects in Spanish. Bare > plural subjects can only appear as foci, never as topics. So, of all the > possible candidates for subjects, all can appear postverbally, but not all > preverbally. Sure, some ideas make very poor topic candidates (those that are very low in topicality, such as non-referential ones). On the other hand, all ideas can be the focus of an assertion in some context or another. I'm not sure of what this has to do with ergativity. Transitive subjects can be foci too, though less often than absolutive subjects, and for a variety of reasons, but not because they are A's as opposed to S's, i.e. not because of their grammatical category. Grammatical relations/categories really cannot explain anything. > BUT in the marking of > DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object > marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer > (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive > marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. Perhaps you could give us some examples and what it is that you interpret as being analogous to ergative-absolutive marking in the Spanish pronominal system. I am familiar with Dryer's paper, although I have more than a few problems with it, and Matthew probably does too now, but I'm not sure I see how it applies to this case. If there is no general interest in this topic I'll be happy to continue this conversation in private. I just learned that there are over 800 people out there lurking who may be bored by all this. Best, Jon ________________________ Jon Aske - aske at earthlink.net Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 From annes at HTDC.ORG Tue Feb 3 08:08:55 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 22:08:55 -1000 Subject: NLP and Syntax in the Classroom Message-ID: Since the original announcement of the availability of "BracketDoctor" to generate trees and labeled brackets in the style of Linguistic Data Consortium's Penn Treebank II guidelines, there have already been requests by several professors and students about the use of the software in the classroom. This is certainly allowable and I would like to offer my services as a consultant to those who would like to use the BracketDoctor as a classroom tool. I am willing to serve as a clearing house for materials and to provide commentary as to what does and does not work and what the reason for it is. I can also implement improvements in the parser as gaps or errors become apparent. Because the development of this software has been done through private investment and it is currently proprietary and patent pending, I cannot reveal the source code or the exact nature of the linguistic theory that is being used, but I can provide general discussion of the Penn Treebank guidelines and of theoretical syntax and English syntax. If this becomes popular, we can provide a shared space for handouts, problems, discussions and so on on our server. If there were sufficient interest we could also set up an email discussion list. Of course, this might also provide invaluable contact with students and professors at other universities. The only requirement for group use is that each member of the class or group download his own copy of the software. The license that is part of the standard set up is written only for single users, so rather than copying it from someone, it is necessary to download it from our web site or get it by email from me. There are also those who have begun to speculate on possible improvements to current NLP devices using the underlying technology. We definitely support such speculation and would encourage you to talk to us about such possibilities. However, please be advised that this is a copyrighted product and the parser that underlies it is patent pending. You cannot make such developments on your own without a license from us. Such licenses will be easy or difficult to obtain depending on the commercial viability of the project being described, the relative role of the parsing technology in the overall value of the project, and the intended uses. In addition to the obvious enhancements to database and Internet searching, web site assistance, and dialoging with game characters, one of the most common comments about possible new products is that this will likely increase the number of possible commands in speech rec systems from a set of a few hundred to thousands. This is because exponential growth, which for years was a problem for NLP actually works in our favor where it is possible to ask for a file (and hundreds of other things) in these and more combinations. (could/would/can/will you) (please) open/get/find/grab/take (me) the file/document/doohickey called/named//which/that is called/ named//which/that/0 I named/called manual.doc or send/mail/email Bob a message/email/letter/memo/fax (that/which says) saying, "meeting at five" Thus, the fact that this parsing system allows all the above variations for all possible commands leads to an exponential growth in the number of possible commands to allow thousands of possibilities over a few dozen commands that are currently allowed while only requiring an increase in vocabulary of a few hundred to a few thousand words. Of course, the real advantage though is that this makes it possible for users of speech rec technologies to do command and control without the need to refer to a list of fixed commands. The user can just speak as though he were talking to a friend or a neighbor. Thus, for students working on projects in syntax or for students looking to design projects in NLP, the BracketDoctor can be a very useful tool, and we would like to encourage professors and students alike to contact us for support, discussion, and commentary. For those of you who have not received the BracketDoctor executable, it is available for download at http://www.ergo-ling.com or by sending an email request to me at bralich at hawaii.edu. To save on bandwidth let me remind you that discussion of this matter beyond this invitation may not be appropriate for the entire list, so rather than just hitting the "reply" button, please respond to me directly at "bralich at hawaii.edu." Sincerely, Phil Bralich Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)5393924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Tue Feb 3 17:38:03 1998 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 12:38:03 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: Anna Sierwierska had a paper on the relationship between word order type and ergative case marking in STUF (Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung) in 1996. As for ergative-patterning word order, I discuss cases of this in "On the six-way word order typology" in Studies in Language in 1997. In some of these cases, the word order is pragmatically determined, the pragmatic factors leading to a statistical pattern that is ergative. But it is also important to distinguish ergative-patterning word order from split intransitive patterning word order, where the position of subjects relative to the verb is pragmatically governed in such a way that there are major differences among particular intransitive verbs that also correlate with their semantics, where it is particularly common for the subjects of certain intransitive verbs to occur in a position normally associated with objects. This is apparently true of many European languages. Matthew Dryer From cmanning at SULTRY.ARTS.USYD.EDU.AU Wed Feb 4 22:19:28 1998 From: cmanning at SULTRY.ARTS.USYD.EDU.AU (Christopher D. Manning) Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 09:19:28 +1100 Subject: ergativity arising Message-ID: On 2 February 1998, John Myhill wrote: > I am vaguely developing a theory about ergativity and word order based > on observations from Austronesian languages > Basically, they (all?) > have some kind of construction with ergative/passive morphology (e.g. > direct object like intransitive subject, transitive subject different but > occurring > much more frequently than, e.g. the English passive. > For > example, there are di-constructions in Indonesian with postverbal patients > which could not be translated into Javanese with the di-construction but > rather has to use the `active' construction. Here's a clear pair: > > INDONESIAN > Dengan sigap disambarnya kayu ela... > with quick seize yardstick > `Quickly, he seized a yardstick...' > (Suman 1978:161) > > JAVANESE > Gage wae deweke ndudut kacune... > quickly she pull-out her-handkerchief > `Quickly, she pulled out her handkerchief...' > (Brata 1979:167-8) I found John's discussion (omitted) really interesting. But I think a problem is lumping together all uses of di- as "the di- passive-ergative construction". I suspect that the fact that some Indonesian di-constructions cannot be translated into Javanese di-constructions reflects the ambiguous status of the di-construction between passive and ergative in Indonesian. In a paper that I've been writing with I Wayan Arka, we argue that while all uses of di- license the Patient to be the surface subject, some are Passive (in the sense that the Agent becomes an oblique and transitivity is decreased by one) while others are Ergative (in the sense that the Agent remains a core argument and transitivity is unchanged -- one just sees a different linking between thematic roles and surface positions). In particular, we argue that the ones with pronominal clitic -nya are ergative not passive, and hence you get, for example, very different behaviour with reflexives: the clitic -nya can act as antecedent for a reflexive, while an oblique PP expression of an agent can't. Dirinya tidak di-perhatikan-nya self.3 NEG di-care -3 `(S)he didn't take care of self.' *Dirinya di-serahkan ke Polisi oleh Amir self.3 di-surrender to police by Amir *`Self was surrendered to Police by Amir.' I think such an understanding of the ambiguity of uses of di- in Indonesian might shed some light on the observations above. Best, Christopher Manning From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Fri Feb 6 10:08:03 1998 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 11:08:03 +0100 Subject: Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Available now on the World Wide Web: A Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics This bibliography, maintained by Michel Buijs, focusses on publications of interest to those working from a functional perspective. Publications are listed in different categories: - Clause Types A. Participial Clauses B. Subclauses - Particles - Pragmatics & Word Order - Tense/Aspect - Miscellaneous - Reference Works The address: http://wwwlet.leidenuniv.nl/www.let.data/gltc/michel/bgl.html Yours, Michel |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands Phone: +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 Fax: +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 E-mail: mbuijs at rullet.leidenuniv.nl |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU Fri Feb 6 17:19:20 1998 From: spikeg at OWLNET.RICE.EDU (Spike Gildea) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 11:19:20 -0600 Subject: (fwd) Call: CSDL-4 Message-ID: From: IN%"csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu" 5-FEB-1998 15:22:18.82 To: IN%"tgivon at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU" CC: Subj: Call: CSDL-4 Hi Tom, Could you forward this to the funknet list? I'd appreciate it, Alan. ----------------------------------------------- CALL FOR ABSTRACTS The Fourth Conference on CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE, AND LANGUAGE (CSDL-4) October 10-12, 1998 Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Invited speakers for theme sessions on: --> Functional and Cognitive Approaches to the Study of First Language Acquisition Nancy BUDWIG (Clark University) Michael TOMASELLO (Max Planck Inst. for Evolutionary Anthropology) third speaker -- TBA -- > Grammatical Constructions: Form and Function Joan BYBEE (University of New Mexico) Talmy GIVON (University of Oregon) Brian MACWHINNEY (Carnegie Mellon University) A special poster session on --> Discourse and Computer-Mediated Communication will be held during the conference sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). A pre-conference symposium will be held on Friday evening, October 9, on --> Primate Communication. The following invited speakers will discuss the research they are conducting at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center of Emory University: Harold Gouzoules Dario Maestripieri Susan Savage-Rumbaugh. WHAT TO SUBMIT We invite papers which consider functional principles of linguistic organization, and the interaction between language and cognition. Priority will be given to papers which examine both the cognitive and discourse functions of linguistic phenomena. Specific areas of inquiry at the conference will include, but not be limited to: Lexical and grammatical meaning Conversational practice Form and function Discourse analysis Conceptual structure Iconicity in language Metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon Language change and grammaticalization Language acquisition Social interaction and grammar Sentence processing We also invite abstracts for the special poster session on Discourse and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Specific areas of inquiry at the session will include, but not be limited to: CMC as a force in linguistic and cognitive change Specialized lexical and typographic registers of CMC Emergent communication norms in CMC Discourse analysis of CMC Discourse styles in the virtual classroom and virtual communities Continuities between CMC and other discourse genres Gender differences in CMC CMC and nonlinear thinking ABSTRACTS for 20-minutes papers or the special-topic poster session may be a maximum of one page. At the top of the abstract (if by e-mail) or on a separate page (if on paper), please include title of paper author name(s) and affiliation(s) topic area (from the list above or whatever seems appropriate) e-mail address paper mailing address SUBMISSION DEADLINE: Abstracts must be received by March 16, 1998. WHERE TO SUBMIT: We STRONGLY prefer e-mail submissions. Abstracts for 20-minute papers for the main session should be e-mailed in ascii form to: . Abstracts for the poster session on Discourse and CMC should be e-mailed in ascii form to: . Please use "Abstract" as your subject header. If you are submitting more than one abstract, please e-mail each separately. If you prefer to use regular mail, send four copies of your abstract for the main conference for the poster session on session to: Discourse and CMC to: CSDL-4 Abstracts Poster session abstracts Program in Linguistics c/o Wendy Newstetter Callaway Center 312S EduTech Institute Emory University Georgia Inst. of Technology Atlanta, GA 30322, USA Atlanta, GA 30332-0280, USA INQUIRIES: For more information, visit the conference web site forthcoming in February at . e-mail inquiries: csdl-4 at learnlink.emory.edu Chair of the organizing committee: Alan Cienki e-mail: lanac at emory.edu phone: 404-727-2689 From clements at INDIANA.EDU Sat Feb 7 17:31:56 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 12:31:56 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: <199802030339.TAA27920@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > Sure, some ideas make very poor topic candidates (those that are very low in > topicality, such as non-referential ones). On the other hand, all ideas can > be the focus of an assertion in some context or another. I'm not sure of > what this has to do with ergativity. Transitive subjects can be foci too, > though less often than absolutive subjects, and for a variety of reasons, > but not because they are A's as opposed to S's, i.e. not because of their > grammatical category. Grammatical relations/categories really cannot > explain anything. Here is my reasoning. First, I'm assuming that frequency determines the default position in Spanish, then secondarily the distribution of different types of NPs, i.e. definite, indefinite and mass/bare plural NPs. As you pointed out, in Spanish intransitive clauses, one finds comparable distribution between pre- and post-verbal subjects. So, frequency as a criterion doesn't help. Next, if we look at the distribution of NP types in pre- and post-verbal position, we find that all types mentioned above appear postverbally, but not all types appear preverbally. This, as you point out, is discourse related. It suggests, nevertheless, that the default position for subjects in Spanish intrans. clauses is postverbal. In transitive clauses, again because of discourse reasons, the subject (which is mostly the topic) is overwhelmingly preverbal. Here frequency tells us that for Spanish transitive clauses, preverbal position is the default position for subjects. So, you find a pattern, apparent in the default position of the subject in transitive and intransitive clauses, that is suggestive of an ergative marking pattern in that trans. clause objects and intrans. clause subjects have their default position postverbally, i.e. they are marked with the same word order. Now, does this mean that Spanish is an ergative language. That's not what is being claimed. The claim is that Spanish exhibits an ergative marking pattern, even though this pattern is accounted for by discourse-related arguments. Postverbal subject word order is not grammaticalized in Spanish. Were it to become grammaticalized, then one could speak of ergativity. The reanalysis of passive marking in some languages leads to an ergative marking. There are, though, transitional stages in the process of the reanalysis. Spanish could be in a similar process with respect to the position of its subject. > > BUT in the marking of > > DOs and IOs in Spanish, there is a Primary Object - Secondary Object > > marking, and this is also found in the Castilian pronominal system. Dryer > > (1986) shows that such a system is analogous to ergative - absolutive > > marking. I'd be happy to give you references if you're interested. > > Perhaps you could give us some examples and what it is that you interpret as > being analogous to ergative-absolutive marking in the Spanish pronominal > system. I am familiar with Dryer's paper, although I have more than a few > problems with it, and Matthew probably does too now, but I'm not sure I see > how it applies to this case. PO marking marks monotrans. DOs and ditransitive IOs identically, just as intrans. subjects and trans. DOs are marked identically. In Spanish, you have personal "a", which disambiguates subjects from objects in monotrans. clauses. If the subject and DO share key features, personal "a" marks the DO. This disambiguation account works for almost all cases except for cases where the DO is personified, as in *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris'. In ditrans. clauses, the IO is marked with personal "a". The crucial test is in ditransitive clauses with two animate objects. Which object is marked? It's the PO, i.e. the IO, as in *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*. For pronominals, *le* marks monotrans. DOs (animate) and ditrans. IOs in a number of dialects, (Castilian, Paraguayan, Uruguayan, among others; so called LEISMO--- there's a lot more to be said because issue of gender and animacy come into play here). So, here again, you find a marking pattern suggestive of ergative marking. Clancy Clements From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Feb 8 04:40:57 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 23:40:57 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Since several people asked that we continue this chat in public rather than in private, I am back with some questions I have about Clancy's latest message to the list. On Saturday, February 07, 1998 12:32 PM J. Clancy Clements wrote: > Here is my reasoning. First, I'm assuming that frequency determines the > default position in Spanish, then secondarily the distribution of different > types of NPs, i.e. definite, indefinite and mass/bare plural NPs. As you I guess where we differ is not in the facts, but in the theoretical interpretation. I object to the use of a "formal" category or label such as "basic word order" or "default position" for grammatical categories--for all languages in general and for Spanish in particular. I think that this is an English-centric view, English being a language which displays a strong statistical correlation between its core grammatical categories (subject and object(s)) and position with respect to the verb. (Still, even for English the correlations are only statistical and don't apply much beyond subject and object.) I guess I think it's a mistake to say something is the "default position" and then the deviations from the norm are explained by extraneous factors, such as "discourse factors". To me this reflects a "transformational mentality" in linguistics (which precedes the transformational grammar tradition) which I don't think belongs in very many places in a cognitive theory of language. At least not in a functionalist one. I think that labels such as "basic word order" may be used informally by linguists involved in typology and description, but cannot be part of a theory of language (a theory of the cognitive representation of language). > pointed out, in Spanish intransitive clauses, one finds comparable > distribution between pre- and post-verbal subjects. So, frequency as a > criterion doesn't help. Next, if we look at the distribution of NP types > in pre- and post-verbal position, we find that all types mentioned above > appear postverbally, but not all types appear preverbally. This, as you > point out, is discourse related. It suggests, nevertheless, that the > default position for subjects in Spanish intrans. clauses is postverbal. But if we know the contexts in which subjects are postverbal vs. postverbal, then why don't we just set that as the "principle" or "strategy" or "rule" or what have you? (A in context B and C in context D). What do we gain by saying that subjects with certain pragmatic properties deviate from the "default position" for subjects? I don't think this is a matter of personal taste. This problem is well known in phonology: how do we deal with variations from a norm? Sometimes it seems to makes sense to posit an "underlying" or basic form and other times this is much more questionable (eg sandhi vs. word internal alternations). To me "basic order" in syntax is a questionable construct. > In transitive clauses, again because of discourse reasons, the subject > (which is mostly the topic) is overwhelmingly preverbal. Here frequency > tells us that for Spanish transitive clauses, preverbal position is the > default position for subjects. I think that the only reason that transitive subjects are more likely (statistically speaking) to be topics than intransitive ones is that whereas in intransitive assertions subjects are often foci (and thus postverbal), in transitive clauses an overt (full nominal) object is more likely to be the focus, for a variety of pragmatic and semantic reasons, which means that the subject has no "choice" but to be the topic (and thus typically "preverbal"). As soon as you add an optional complement to an asserted intransitive clause (Juan vino ayer 'Juan came yesterday'), you find that this added complement is much more likely to be the focus (than the subject is), which means that the subject is much more likely to be the topic. Thus the likelihood of a subject being preverbal vs. postverbal, ie of being the topic vs. the focus, is only *correlated* with whether the verb is transitive or not, but not at all caused or explained by it. (Note, however, that not all inverted subjects are foci; some subjects are inverted for other reasons, which I won't get into). > So, you find a pattern, apparent in the default position of the subject in > transitive and intransitive clauses, that is suggestive of an ergative > marking pattern in that trans. clause objects and intrans. clause subjects I guess I object to using the label "ergative" as an abstract, "platonic" property of languages. I object to using it as if it was "explanatory" in nature, when it is nothing but a name, or label, for a grammatical phenomenon: the coding of (some) "intransitive subjects" the same way as direct objects. > The claim is that Spanish > exhibits an ergative marking pattern, even though this pattern is > accounted for by discourse-related arguments. As I said, to me ergativity is a (typically morphological) *coding system*, a system which has its own logic and its own very interesting diachronic sources (but not an underlying pattern of linguistic organization). Now, word order in Spanish does not code grammatical relations at all but rather functional (informational) relations. It is true that there are *statistical* affinities between S and O in Spanish, and in all languages, but these affinities have explanations which are quite different from those which explain analogous grammatical coding (ergativity). > Postverbal subject word order is not grammaticalized in Spanish. Were it > to become grammaticalized, then one could speak of ergativity. The > reanalysis of passive marking in some languages leads to an ergative > marking. There are, though, transitional stages in the process of the > reanalysis. Spanish could be in a similar process with respect to the > position of its subject. I don't think that postverbal order of intransitive subjects could ever become grammaticalized in Spanish, or in any other language, simply because of the fact that the phenomenon does not have a grammatical basis, but rather an informational one. Ergative coding always comes about indirectly, by the reanalysis of constructions, given the fact the semantic and informational correlations between S and O are rather weak. > PO marking marks monotrans. DOs and ditransitive IOs identically, just as > intrans. subjects and trans. DOs are marked identically. This applies to human, or human-like, direct objects only, right? (*Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' I think is out of the question, as far as I know; but "Visito a mi perro" 'I visit my dog' is OK). I think that it's possible that this "syncretism" is motivated by the "need" to disambiguate objects from subjects when both have similar semantic characteristics (being human, as most transitive subjects are), and that it was facilitated by the semantic similarities between direct and indirect objects (both are typically human and in some way "recipient" or "benefactives" for the action). But I still don't understand what this has to do with ergativity. I am also highly skeptical of this category "primary object". About the "crucial test" sentence, *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*, I admit that this is a very interesting sentence. Still, the sentence seems to me more than a bit odd, and I think that to the extent that it is accepted by speakers, it probably has a very good explanation without having to resort to a primary object category. Leismo (and the personal a) makes sense because human direct objects are typically affected by actions in ways more like the way typical indirect objects (recipients, benefactives, malefactives) are than the way non-human (non-animate? non-empathetic?) objects are. To the extent that there can only be one such element, it makes sense that it would be the dative in this sentence (Marta), which would block the (diachronic or synchronic) extension of personal a marking to human objects like Luisa in this example. This would also explain why this sentence seems odd and is probably avoided by many speakers (except perhaps those for whom the construction is fully conventionalized). Anyway, thanks for your comments, and I encourage others to join in in this exchange. Best, Jon ____________________________ Jon Aske aske at earthlink.net or Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Sun Feb 8 12:03:19 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 14:03:19 +0200 Subject: No subject Message-ID: Would anyone happen to know the email address of Jim Gair? Thanks. John Myhill From dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Feb 9 03:08:42 1998 From: dryer at ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (Matthew S Dryer) Date: Sun, 8 Feb 1998 22:08:42 -0500 Subject: Ergativity correlations Message-ID: I agree with Jon Aske that the notion of primary object is not relevant to case marking in Spanish, and that what is crucial to understanding the system is animacy and disambiguation. But I would like to recommend a paper that is directly relevant to this discussion, namely a paper by Carol Genetti on object relations in Dolakha Newari that appeared in Studies in Language in 1997. Case marking in Dolakha Newari is reminiscent of Spanish and as Carol argues (p. 59) "Dryer's analysis ... works well for a language where casemarking follows a true primary object pattern, but as Noonan (1991: 57) notes, it is not relevant for languages where only some patients are casemarked." At best, the pattern in languages like Dolakha Newari and Spanish may be a diachronic source for primary objectivity. Matthew Dryer From annes at HTDC.ORG Thu Feb 12 05:27:19 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 19:27:19 -1000 Subject: ESL Grammar Checker Available Message-ID: Japan Information Processing (JIP) or Nihon Denshi Keisan of Tokyo, Japan has just made their "English Sentence Enhancer" available for free over the Japanese internet. 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Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Thu Feb 12 15:55:28 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 09:55:28 -0600 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: Here is a late and minor contribution to the ergativity issue. Sorry for the delay but, for some reason, I could not connect to the net. I agree with Jon Aske?s comments and would like to add a minor piece of information. Assuming that Spanish is a Primary-Secondary Object Language based on a quite artificial example as *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*may be inadqeuate. The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy in Spanish. The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta* I would say 1) "Juan le presento? a Luisa a Marta" I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: 2) Juan presento? a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. By the way *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' is also very strange I would say *Visite? Paris hace seis meses* "I visited Patris six months ago" No "a" there. The inclusion of the preposition "a" would impose a reading where Paris is affected by my visit. I must be missing something here because I cannot see how this could be an argument for an Ergative interpretation. Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Thu Feb 12 16:12:53 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 10:12:53 -0600 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: This may come a bit late in the discussionof ergativity. I could not send it before becuase, for some reason, I could only recieve but not send messages to the net. I hope some of you are still interested in the topic. I agree with Jon Aske?s comments and would like to add a minor piece of information. Assuming that Spanish is a Primary-Secondary Object Language based on a quite artificial example as *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta*may be inadqeuate. The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy in Spanish. The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta Luisa a Marta* I would say 1) "Juan le presento? a Luisa a Marta" I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: 2) Juan presento? a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. By the way *Visito a Paris* 'I visit Paris' is also very strange I would say *Visite? Paris hace seis meses* "I visited Patris six months ago" No "a" there. The inclusion of the preposition "a" would impose a reading where Paris is affected by my visit. I must be missing something here because I cannot see how this could be an argument for an Ergative interpretation. Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Thu Feb 12 18:16:36 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 13:16:36 -0500 Subject: Spanish objects (WAS: Ergativity) In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I'm glad that Ricardo confirms my initial reaction to that very interesting Spanish example of Clancy's in which the "personal a" is not present with a human object in Spanish when there is a dative around (cf. Juan presento Luisa a Marta). (My initial reaction being that the issue is more complex that that single example might suggest and that different strategies may be followed by speakers in a situation which is confusing and rare, avoidance being definitely one.) I would just like to report another reaction to that sentence which was sent to me directly by Victoria V?zquez Rozas of the Facultade de Filolox?a of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia(fevvazq at usc.es). I quote it in full (with her permission), cause I think the (real, live) data is very interesting. I love in particular the ambiguous example at the end. >>>>>> BEGINNING OF QUOTE (my translation, JA) ... Examples such as *Juan present? Luisa a Marta* also present some difficulties. On the one hand, as a speaker, this example seems very strange to me (I don't think I would ever say anything like that). On the other hand, I have been able to corroborate their rarity in a modern Spanish corpus. The research group I am part of has created a syntactic database with more than 160,000 clauses from a modern Spanish corpus. There are 362 tokens of the verb "presentar" [introduce], of which 22 correspond to the syntactic schema Subject(animate)-Indirect object(animate)-Direct object (animate). In a great many of them, both the direct and indirect objects are coded only as clitic pronouns (e.g. "Un chico no se acercaba a una muchacha en el paseo ni la sacaba a bailar sin que se (OI) la (OD) hubieran presentado previamente" [a boy would not approach a girl or take her out to dance without anybody having introduced her to him first]). In other examples, only one of the objects is a clitic ("Te presento a la madre de mi novio"; "Recuerda que un buen d?a un amigo le present? a su prima"); in these cases, the clitic is the indirect object and the full subject with a "personal a" is a direct object. Only one of the examples is ambiguous in its interpretation: "Hoy precisamente doy una comida y quiero presentarte a mis amigos, les vas a encantar" [Just today I'm having some people for dinner and I want to [introduce you to my friends / introduce my friends to you], they're going to love you.] If instead of "les vas a encantar" [they're going to love you], the text said "te van a encantar" [you're going to love them], the most plausible interpretation would be similar to that in the rest of the examples; however because it says "les vas a encantar" it seems easier to interpret "te" as direct object and "a mis amigos" as indirect object. ... >>>>>>>>>> END OF QUOTE Out of context the clause "quiero presentarte a mis amigos" is completely ambiguous between I want to introduce you to my friends and I want to introduce my friends to you. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it too. Best, Jon ________________________________ Jon Aske mailto://Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu or mailto://aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 Bat eman eta bi hartu, gure etxean ez berriz sartu ** "Give one and take two, don't come back into our house.". --Basque Proverb From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sat Feb 14 04:33:42 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 23:33:42 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I apologize too for arriving "a la hora latina" at the discussion. My comments are rather general and are not intended as taking sides but rather as summarizing and bringing additinal aspects to the discussion. RE: Ergativity correlations: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Clancy's original proposal is crystal clear and should come as no surprise, given well-established 'findings' in the literature on ergativity such as DuBois (1987) and Durie (1988, I guess, anyway, his article in Lingua). According to Clancy, the fact that unmarked transitive clauses in Spanish tend to be of the SVO (or AVO) type plus the fact that unmarked transitive ones tend to be VS should speak for a discourse-based (in the sense that the distribution of such orders is pragmatically determined) tendency to syntactically treat O (transitive object) and S (intransitive subject) similarly, that is both in postverbal position. I see no tragedy in that PROVIDED -ojo- PROVIDED, one can with a comfortable degree of certainty establish that there is indeed a tendency for intransitive sentences to be VS in most contexts (not just with full subject NPs, discourse-initially, which I'm afraid is the case) as well as for transitive clauses to be SVO. I have no text counts to make any claims, but I suspect such counts would yield a "tie" rather than a "win" to the claimed unmarked status of such orders, again PROVIDED we can all agree on a language-specific definition of unmarked orders in this language. RE: Objects > Ricardo wrote: > The deletion of the preposition "a" is simply not the most common strategy > in Spanish. > The Speaker can either keep both "a"s or use other strategies. Let me give > more natural examples for that type of structure. Instead of *Juan presenta > Luisa a Marta* I would say > > 1) "Juan le presento? a Luisa a Marta" > > I should stress that for most dialects of Spanish the clitic "le" is > required. Ambiguity is noramlly resolved by the assuming normal DO, IO word > order. Now it is true that double "a" is commonly avoided, however the > deletion of the Direct Object "a" is not the first strategy at all. In fact > the most transparent way to disambiguate would be 2: > > 2) Juan presento? a Luisa con Marta "Juan introduced Luisa with Marta" > > where the IO becomes an Oblique and the DO preserves the "a" preposition. > > Given that in Spanish you can either keep both "a" prepositions, demote the > IO to an oblique or, in a less natural manner, delete the DO "a" the > strength of the argument should be taken with a grain of salt. What constitutes more "natural" strategies is a highly complicated matter in Spanish. What I would like to stress is the fact that presence/absence of 'a' is not a matter of "strategies" (for what?), nor is there a preference to either keep or delete 'a', but -as already latent in Ricardo's posting- is determined by the identifiability of the referents (needless to say, even less to whether they are "personal" objects or not, an outdated view that unexplicably has lots of followers). That is, the role of 'a' in Spanish is one of reference and as such belongs in the function of agreement and not in the one of case; 'a' is not a marker of dependency relations. I have argued for that in a paper (1995) in Orbis 38. I found these sentences while reading a History of Central America on the way home tonight: (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien a la importacion de productos europeos. Source: Fonseca, Elizabeth. (1933). "Economia y sociedad en Centroamerica". In Pinto, Julio (ed.). El Periodo Colonial. Historia General de Centroamerica. Vol 2. Madrid: FLACSO. The text is written by native speakers. From the examples we can corroborate that: a. 'le' is an obligatory cross-referencing mechanism; b. 'le' has shifted from the case (dependency) function to that of agreement (reference); c. the use of 'a' as reference -not case- marker is still dependent on several factors, that is, it has not been syntacticized yet as much as 'le', some of which are the inherent features of the objects, discourse relevance of the referents it "agrees" with, etc. As such, its use is intermittent. d. there is no way to tell whether in (1) the absence of 'a' is the result of a strategy from the writer to avoid 'a' doubling, even less possible is it to say that the absence of 'a' in (1) is a "less natural manner". (1) sounds perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence. Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of (1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). The desambiguation approach as insinuated above by Ricardo -which I must admit is a bit 'foggy'- falls short there. > Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance > of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument > for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested > to know his reasoning on this topic. > Ricardo Maldonado I second Ricardo's plea for clarification there too. Diego Quesada University of Toronto From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sat Feb 14 17:52:57 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 12:52:57 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, Diego, and company, Some further comments on all these matters, which I hope those who are not familiar with the Spanish data are being able to follow (I am including translations of Diego's examples). About the correlation between S and O and postverbal position and A and preverbal position in Spanish, I repeat I think this is a rather weak correlation. In my experience, overt (full nominal) objects (O's) tend to be foci, as do about half of overt intransitive subjects (S's). Not so much overt A's, however. This explains the fact that overt S's are postverbal more often than overt A's are, since foci are predominantly postverbal in Spanish. Let us not forget that word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical relations in Spanish at all. And let us not forget that: a) Very salient foci (i.e. emphatic or contrastive ones), be they subjects or objects or what have you, are typically placed preverbally (as in so-called "OV languages"), cf. Silva-Corval?n's (1984) well-known example: *Efortil me dieron a mi!* "Efortil{Foc} they gave me," "Efortil is what they gave me" (the clitic *me* is like part of the verb for information structure purposes, so the focus counts as being immediately preverbal). b) Subjects (and all other settings) may also be postverbal, not because they are foci, but because they are topics in an assertion with a very salient foci (cf. exclamations, e.g. *Siempre viene Juan los viernes!* "Juan ALWAYS comes on Fridays"; *Cuando viene Juan?* "when does Juan come). These "antitopics" do not receive an information accent, such as foci and left-dislocated topics do. About the so-called (don't blame me) "personal A": > What constitutes more "natural" strategies is a highly complicated > matter in Spanish. No doubt about it. > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... [the threat of confiscating the Indians from them] (For those who are not familiar with the language, the interesting thing here is that there is no (so-called personal) "a" before "los indios".) > (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de > Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien > a la importacion de productos europeos. [the very sporadic arrival of ships to the Honduran harbors didn't only affect [a] (the) exports, but also the imports, of European products] (The interesting thing here is that the (inanimate) object of affect has the "a".) Surely these are interesting cases in that they don't follow the traditional rule, according to which human direct objects bear the A and non-human objects don't. It seems to me that the traditional rule works for 95% of the cases (in writing perhaps a bit less, since writing tends to be more conservative), and that most of the exceptions can be seen as extensions of the rule (such as pets being treated as humans, for example). That still leaves examples such as the ones above, which, I repeat, are very interesting. The lack of A in the first example (treating the object's referent as an object, or merchandise) may be due, not so much to the presence of a covert human dative (a clitic, not a full nominal), but to the desire to avoid ambiguity, since without context, the sentence: La amenaza de confiscarles A los indios... could mean either (1) the threat of confiscating the Indians from them or (2) the threat of confiscating from the Indians (of course a racist attitude towards Indians could have something to do with it too). But I think there is another reason for not using the A in the first example, which would also be a reason for using the A in the second example, namely the fact that confiscar (confiscate) typically takes an inanimate direct object (merchandise) and that afectar (affect) typically takes a human direct object, and thus the absence vs. presence of the A is somewhat automatic (grammaticalized). The possibility of dropping the A in the first example would be due to the fact that the object of confiscate is typically some type of merchandise and merchandise is not marked with A, be it human or not. (But if it wasn't Indians but, say, relatives, the personal A would not have been ommitted.) The addition of the A in the second example, which by the way doesn't sound all that great to my non Costa Rican ears, I can only see as an extension of the prototypical case in which the affected party is human. Just some thoughts. Let me know what you think Best, Jon From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sun Feb 15 03:24:06 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 22:24:06 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802141753.JAA17061@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sat, 14 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > About the correlation between S and O and postverbal position and A and > preverbal position in Spanish, I repeat I think this is a rather weak > correlation. In my experience, overt (full nominal) objects (O's) tend to > be foci, as do about half of overt intransitive subjects (S's). Not so > much overt A's, however. This explains the fact that overt S's are > postverbal more often than overt A's are, since foci are predominantly > postverbal in Spanish. Having made no counts myself I have nothing to say here. Still, just on paper -that is, regardless of the information structure of the A, S, and O referents- the fact that one-argument structures tend to be postverbal while two-argument structures tend to be SVO matches -accidentally if you like- the ergative pattern. This, I assume, was Clancy's original proposal. Now, I'd be surprised if such a pattern were recurrent, frequent, and likely to be categorically predicted. For one, as Jon suggests: > word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical > relations in Spanish at all. Second, Spanish, as many other languages, tends to make a basic distinction between the word order of sentence at discourse-onset (thetic, in Lambrecht's 1994 terminology), with full (overt) NPs, and the rest; the former do tend to be S/A-initial; the others... well, it takes all kinds. This fact, rather than supporting Clancy's claim, speaks for a discourse-determined word order pattern, as determined basically by topic continuity. In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. Thus, despite the arroz-con-mango style of word order in Spanish, it seems to be in line with what occurs in many (?) other languages of different affiliations. > b) Subjects (and all other settings) may also be postverbal, not because > they are foci, but because they are topics in an assertion with a very > salient foci (cf. exclamations, e.g. *Siempre viene Juan los viernes!* "Juan > ALWAYS comes on Fridays"; *Cuando viene Juan?* "when does Juan come). These > "antitopics" do not receive an information accent, such as foci and > left-dislocated topics do. Is the double-starring signalling ungramaticality/unacceptability or what? In any case, I'd tend to say the first of those sentences with Juan at the left (Juan siempre...). The other one sounds OK. > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... > [the threat of confiscating the Indians from them] > > (For those who are not familiar with the language, the interesting thing > here is that there is no (so-called personal) "a" before "los indios".) > > > (2) La llegada tan esporadica de los barcos a los puertos de > > Honduras no solo afecto a las exportaciones, sino tambien > > a la importacion de productos europeos. > [the very sporadic arrival of ships to the Honduran harbors didn't only > affect [a] (the) exports, but also the imports, of European products] > > (The interesting thing here is that the (inanimate) object of affect has the > "a".) > > Surely these are interesting cases in that they don't follow the traditional > rule, according to which human direct objects bear the A and non-human > objects don't. There you go! I have lots of cases -from both oral and written language- that show that presence/absence of 'a' has every time less to do with the human/animate status of the direct object referent. Typical in this respect are cases of left-dislocation where the D.O. is not 'a'-marked: (3) Juan lo vi ayer Juan 3sg.masc see-perf yesterday ***WITHOUT*** a pause between Juan and the rest of the sentence (this is part of a long story I won't go into). Just as there are cases of inanimate D.O.'s which are 'a'-marked: (from Suner 1989) (4) Lo van a empujar al omnibus. 3sg.masc go-3pres.pl a-3def.sg bus Besides, cases as those in (5a-d) are more than common: (5a) Busque abogado si no quiere que lo guarden Look for-imper. lawyer if [2sg] neg want-2sg that 3sg. put-3subj.pl in jail 'You'd better get yourself a lawyer if you don't want to end up in jail' (5b) Busque un abogado... (5c) Busque a un abogado si no... (5d) Busque abogados si no... (5e) ? Busque a unos abogados si no... (5f) ? Busue unos abogados si no... Clearly, being human is not a necessary condition for 'a'-marking. The key to the puzzle lies in that 'a' is not a marker of grammatical relations anymore. The system is moving to a different pattern. > I think there is another reason for not using the A in the first > example, which would also be a reason for using the A in the second example, > namely the fact that confiscar (confiscate) typically takes an inanimate > direct object (merchandise) and that afectar (affect) typically takes a > human direct object, and thus the absence vs. presence of the A is somewhat > automatic (grammaticalized). > > The possibility of dropping the A in the first example would be due to the > fact that the object of confiscate is typically some type of merchandise and > merchandise is not marked with A, be it human or not. (But if it wasn't > Indians but, say, relatives, the personal A would not have been ommitted.) Could be. > The addition of the A in the second example, which by the way doesn't sound > all that great to my non Costa Rican ears, I can only see as an extension of > the prototypical case in which the affected party is human. Could be too, thereby partially confirming the old rule of [+ human] referents, but which is giving way to a new shift in the language. Diego From A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL Sun Feb 15 11:56:36 1998 From: A.M.Bolkestein at LET.UVA.NL (A.M. Bolkestein) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 12:56:36 +0100 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras (1995) on VS order in a number of European languages (among other classical Latin (by me), Italian (by Giuliano Bernini) , modern Greek (by Hans Juergen Sasse), data from early Romance languages, among other, I believe, early Spanish data (Rosanna Sornicola). There are statistical data in some of these articles, and , among other, attention for both semantic parameters (valency) and discourse conditions. Why not have a look at it? It is I believe directly relevant. Machtelt Bolkestein Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam Oude Turfmarkt 129 NL-1012 GC Amsterdam Fax: ++31.20.5252544 E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at let.uva.nl From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Sun Feb 15 14:16:52 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 09:16:52 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische > Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras > (1995) on > VS order in a number of European languages... Thanks very much for the tip. J. Diego Quesada From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Sun Feb 15 15:59:31 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 10:59:31 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Machtelt, Thanks for bringing up that reference. Sasse and Matras (1995) is a very interesting collection of studies, in particular Sasse's two articles in that volume, as is Sasse's wonderful 1987 article on thetic sentences ("The thetic/categorical distinction revisited," Linguistics 25, 1987). My major problem with the approach followed in those studies, besides the fact that they don't look at actual spoken data, but rather data from different written genres, is that they use a structural property--postverbal position of the subject--to categorize assertions. As I have argued before, I believe that there are two rather different reasons why a subject might be postverbal in these "VO languages", namely (1) when the subject is the focus. Then it receives the information accent associated with the assertion. But we must remember too that not all foci are postverbal: more salient ones are often preverbal in these languages, e.g. JUAN vino! "Juan (is who) came"; Un LIbro trajo! "a book (is what) he brought"). (Beware: these sentences typically need context and sound a bit odd out of the blue and when used to elicit acceptability judgements) and (2) when the subject is an accessible (anti)topic, and then it doesn't receive an information accent. This type of "postposing" can be seen in the so-called right-dislocation construction in English (which doesn't really dislocate the subject, as Ziv 1994 for instance has successfully argued, "Left and right dislocations: Discourse functions and anaphora"), but it is much more common in less rigid VO languages. The motivation for this type of postposing, I believe, is the presence of a very salient focus in the assertion, which is why this "strategy" is associated with exclamations and other types of emphatic assertions, as well as content questions, and so on. This "strategy" seems to easily acquire additional "rhetorical" uses, which are to some extent conventionalized, thus I found that it is very common in Mexican newspaper headlines, but not in Spanish newspaper headlines; also, this type of inversion is more common in conversation and in some conversational styles than others, not surprisingly since it is related to "focus emphasis", and thus an "optional" "operation". (These sentences too, and emphatic assertions in general, sometimes sound odd out of context when used to elicit acceptability judgements) (Note too that this type of postposing extends to settings of all types, such as locatives, temporals, conditionals, etc, not just to topics (which I believe are just a specialized type of setting). Thus, e.g., "Come here [when I call you]!" What will you do [if I don't go]?) The first type of subject postposing (focus subject) is much more common with intransitive (and monovalent) predicates than with transitive (and polyvalent) predicates for the simple reason that in these situations there are less candidates for the focus role and thus the subject is more likely to be the focus (I believe all assertions have a focus constituent, which receives the "comment"'s information accent, and that not all assertions have a topic, though most do). The second type of subject postposing (antitopic subject) I believe happens equally with polyvalent/transitive predicates as with monovalent/intransitive ones. I should also mention that I don't think that all clauses which have a postverbal focus subject are thetic, since in many cases another argument of the verb fills the topic role, something which Sasse does not mention (cf., e.g., Spanish: "Y cuando llego, lo vio mi PAdre" And when he arrived my father saw him...). Anyway, for this reason I believe that there may be problems using Sasse's group's data for our purposes, even though it is undoubtedly very interesting and Sasse's original study was definitely ground-breaking. Also, as I just mentioned, the use of topic inversion varies a great deal from genre to genre and style to style, which means we have to be very careful about not comparing apples with oranges when we compare languages. Best, Jon > -----Original Message----- > From: FUNKNET -- Discussion of issues in Functional Linguistics > [mailto:FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU]On Behalf Of A.M. Bolkestein > Sent: Sunday, February 15, 1998 6:57 AM > To: FUNKNET at LISTSERV.RICE.EDU > Subject: Re: Ergativity and objects in Spanish > > > There is a special issue of the journal STUF (Sprachtypologische > Universalien Forschung) edited by Hans Juergen Sasse and Yaron Matras > (1995) on > VS order in a number of European languages (among other classical Latin > (by me), Italian (by Giuliano Bernini) , modern Greek (by Hans Juergen > Sasse), data from early Romance languages, among other, I believe, > early Spanish data (Rosanna Sornicola). There are statistical data in > some of these articles, and , among other, attention for both semantic > parameters (valency) and discourse conditions. Why not have a look at it? > It is I believe directly relevant. > Machtelt Bolkestein > Dept. of Classics, University of Amsterdam > Oude Turfmarkt 129 > NL-1012 GC Amsterdam > Fax: ++31.20.5252544 > E-mail: a.m.bolkestein at let.uva.nl > ________________________________ Jon Aske mailto://Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu or mailto://aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ Beltz guztiak ez dira ikatz ** "Not everything that's black is coal.". --Basque Proverb From clements at INDIANA.EDU Sun Feb 15 18:14:37 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 13:14:37 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802121555.JAA11580@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Feb 1998, Ricardo Maldonado wrote: > Finally, I am not clear about what Clancy Clements means by the relevance > of LEISMO to this specific topic and how that would constitute an argument > for an ergative interpretation of intransitives. I would be very interested > to know his reasoning on this topic. Ricardo, Diego, Jon, and other funknetters, Here's what I had in mind with leismo suggesting a Primary Object - Secondary Object pattern. I'll cite data from Klein-Andreu and then offer a brief explanation. LE/LO pronominalization of masc. direct objects Animates Inanimates le lo %le le lo %le St. Teresa 83 2 98% 22 3 88% Professional Women 67 6 92% 16 21 43% Rural Speakers 36 0 100% 22 6 76% "Frequency of le as a function of the referents' animacy in (1) writings of St. Teresa; (2) speech of present-day Castilian professional women; (3) speech of present-day Castilian rural speakers. Only count NPs were considered." From Klein-Andreu, Flora. 1992. Understanding standards. In Garry W. David and Gregory K. Iverson (eds.) Explanation in historical linguistics, 176-78.Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins. The point is this: monotrans. DOs and ditrans. IOs are marked increasingly by LE, in some cases (e.g. rural Castilian speakers) exclusively by LE. This suggests that a Primary OBj. - Secondary Object system is being adopted for masc. In future, this may or may not extend into the domain of the fem DO. At present in rural speakers, we have the following: Primary Object: LE (masc/fem. IO; masc. monotrans. DO) and LA (fem DO) Secondary Object: LO (masc.) LA (fem.) There is some evidence that LE is found with fem. DO. In Baroja, for example, we find the following (from Marcos Marin _Estud. sobre el pronombre_, 1978, p.255): LE D.O. masc. person 131 fem person 6 animals 6 thing 1 Baroja was Basque and, consequently, there might be something going on there (cf. Alazne Landa's dissertation on Basque Spanish for substrate influence of Basque on Spanish of that region). In his analysis of the magazine ABC as an example of modern Castilian, Marcos Marin says there seem to be two pronominal systems in Castilian: the etymological one (the DO-IO system), and a second system where the masc. animate DO is being replaced by LE. He discovered, however, a third system as well, in which, he says, LE has triumphed as the pronoun for the masc. and "is invading dangerously but not overwhelmingly the domain of the feminine..." The feminine DO pronoun LA is, acc. to Marcos Marin, gradually losing ground to LE. In my estimation, the Castilian pronominal system seems to be moving towards a PO - SO system, where all monotrans. animate (and gradually inanimate) DOs are pronominalized by LE(S), all IOs are pronominalized by LE(S), and all ditrans. DOs are pronominalized by LO(s)/LA(s). Now, as for full objects NPs, *Luisa presento' Juan a sus padres* is admittedly odd (though found acceptable by some native speakers I consulted). Another option *Luisa presento' a Juan a sus padres* was preferred by another native speaker I consulted. Still other native speakers said they'd avoid the construction, which coincides with Victoria Valzquez' findings, which Jon was nice enough to translate and share with all. The conclusion regarding full NP marking, then, as reflecting or suggesting a PO - SO system instead of a DO - IO system, in inconclusive. I find the pronominalization facts more suggestive of a PO - SO system. Finally, please disregard the _visito a Paris_ example, which is, as Ricardo pointed out, irrelevant for the discussion at hand. Saludos, Clancy From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Mon Feb 16 04:02:39 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 23:02:39 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Clancy & Co., I was familiar with the very interesting data you give us (the Spanish that I am most familiar with is very similar to Baroja's Spanish), but I am really not convinced that your conclusion about the changes in the object system is warranted. It seems to me that other, more "mundane", reasons may very well be at play here, though I admit I don't have a fully coherent theory about it, just some half-baked ideas. My main reason for being skeptical I guess has to do with the fact that non-human direct objects are for the most part excluded from being treated (coded the same way) as indirect objects (both for the purpose of adding the A or of having the "dative" LE clitic as opposed to the LO/LA "accusative" clitic). If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just to those with human referents. What I see, rather, is a syncretism between datives and accusatives that share semantic properties of prototypical datives (humanness, affectedness, etc.). We could call that the "enabling motivation" for the syncretism. Then the "communicative motivation" for the syncretism could be the fact that it enables the coding of an accusative nominal differently from a nominative one, something which can come in very handy, especially when the two have similar "semantic profiles" in a language with rather flexible word order (i.e. one driven by pragmatic, not grammatical, relations). The fact that non-human accusatives are excluded from this syncretism to me suggests that these changes are not really changes in an abstract system of grammatical relations. (I must confess that I tend to prefer concrete, system-external arguments to abstract, system-internal ones; the latter are what was traditionally known as functional explanations in linguistics, the former is what modern functionalists tend to favor nowadays). This still leaves the mystery of why LE wasn't extended as readily to masculine accusatives as to feminine ones, even while the "personal A" extended equally to accusatives of both genders. I think the reason for this may have to do with a blockage to the spread of LE to feminines caused by a 'faint' association between LE and masculine gender. I know this sounds like a lame reason, especially given that LE is not gender specific when used as a dative pronoun, and that the block is obviously not insurmountable, but I really think that there may be something to this conjecture. I would love to hear what others think about this. I would also like to have the diachronic facts about the development of LE, LO, LA, which I don't have at my fingertips right now, and which I think may provide some clues. Cheers, Jon """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu / aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always have some people on your side that you wish were on the other side. --Jascha Heifetz From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Mon Feb 16 14:25:24 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 09:25:24 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802160402.UAA22601@italy.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: Just a word on what On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to > give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just > to those with human referents. Of course; it has to start somewhere; from humans it will spread. There are cases of 'le' referring to non-animate objects: (1) Desde alla no se le ve [From there you can't see it] where 'le' can refer to any landmark (the crater of a volcano, the see, a tuny island in the bay, etc.). > What I see, rather, is a syncretism between datives and accusatives that > share semantic properties of prototypical datives (humanness, affectedness, > etc.). Well, this is exactly what is going on; that's why it comes a s a surprise to me that you would expect all this to happen at once. For sure, it's a recent development. > We could call that the "enabling motivation" for the syncretism. > Then the "communicative motivation" for the syncretism could be the fact > that it enables the coding of an accusative nominal differently from a > nominative one, something which can come in very handy, especially when the > two have similar "semantic profiles" in a language with rather flexible word > order (i.e. one driven by pragmatic, not grammatical, relations). This makes sense and is not incompatible at all with the fact that 'le-extension' has not gone very far yet (but which is in progress). Diego From gallego at UVIGO.ES Mon Feb 16 15:22:05 1998 From: gallego at UVIGO.ES (Jose M. Garcia.Miguel) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 16:22:05 +0100 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: Hello to all Funknetters worried about Spanish syntax. I would like to say something about ergativity and object in Spanish, but first I must apologize for this sort of English / Spanglish I write RE: Objects in Spanish Agreeing with J. Aske and relying on the data provided by Vazquez Rozas and by Ricardo Maldonado, it seems clear to me that Spanish has not a "Primary Object" system. The object of ditransitive clauses [P2] has the very same realisations that the objecto of monotransitive clauses [P1]. And both allow realisations (lo, bare NP) forbidden to Indirect Object [R]. That is P1 : le/lo, (a)+NP [OD in monotransitive clauses] P2 : le/lo, (a) NP [OD in ditransitive clauses] R : le, a NP (but *lo, *NP) [OI in ditransitive clauses] --> le/lo[OD] veo, veo a Juan[OD], veo el libro [OD] (monotransitive) --> le/lo[OD] present? a mis amigos[OI], (ditransitive) --> le [OI] present? el informe[OD], --> le [OI] present? a mis amigos [OD] (potentially ambiguous) I think, a 'primary object' system should equate P1 = R, and at the same time P1 # P2. At most, variable object marking may suggest that, for some dialect -'leistas'- and for some objects -most of all, masculine nouns high in the animacy hierarchy, and speech act participants pronouns- we have a NEUTRAL system which equates P1 = P2 = R. That is: P1 = P2 = R : le, a FN Nevertheless, the potential ambiguity arising in ditransitive clauses witth two human objects, is rarely foun in real discourse, where the different degrees of topicality for each referent. Normally at most one object should appear as a full NP (I think this has to do with Chafe's "one new idea constraint" -I lost the exact reference) RE: Ergativity effects in Spanish intransitive clauses. I agree with Jon Aske about that: > word order is not a mechanism for coding grammatical > relations in Spanish at all. On the other hand, there seems to be no 'basic word order' in Spanish intransitive clauses. I do have some statistical data from ARTHUS (the corpus of contemporary Spanish of the University os Santiago de Compostela, also cited by V. V?zquez Rozas / Jon Aske's translation)The date refer only to full NP participants (this data are included in my book "Tnsitividad y complementacion preposicional en espa?ol", published by the University of Santiago de Compostela): (mono)transitive clauses: AV / VA VO / OV 78% / 22% 97'5% / 2,5% Intransitive clauses: SV / VS 47% / 53% Of course, it remains to be explained, as J. Aske points out, the influence of discourse functions, such as topic or focus, that is what decides word order in Spanish. In any case, those of you interested in word order in Spanish will fin useful the in-depth study by Bel?n L?pez Meirama: La posici?n del sujeto en la cl?usula monoactancial del espa?ol, also published by the University of Santiago de Compostela. She studies the correlation of word order -in intransitive clauses- with verb class, control, animacy and definiteness. In any case, I think that we can not talk about ergativity if we don't pay attention to grammatical marking (agreement, case, ...). It is grammatical grammatical marking what gives ergative, accusative and active systems. We don't have an ergative system relying only in the semantic or discourse functions of S. It sems clear that agentivity and topicality are typical properties of A vs. O, but a priori S, the unique participant of monotransitives, is NEUTRAL in this respect, sometimes more like A, sometimes more like O. It is grammaticalisation what gives preminence to the semantic and pragmatic similarity with A (accusative systems) or to the semantic and pragmatic similarity with O (ergative systems) PD: A note on Chibchan languages Diego Quesada wrote: > In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan > languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the > word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): > SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. > I'm doing right now some work on textual data of Chibchan languages of Costa Rica -Bribri, Guatuso. They are OV languages, with variable order of A, resulting as far as I now in AOV and OVA, but not OAV. I'm interested in the discourse factors that correlate with the position of A, and especially in the factors that correlate with the presence or absence of the ergative morpheme, which in this languages is sometimes optional. I guess this has to do with topicality and with the distinction between given and new information. Could you give me some tips? Best regards -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jose M. Garcia-Miguel Linguistica Xeral Departamento de Traduccion, Linguistica e Teoria da Literatura Tfno: +34 86 812355 - Universidade de Vigo Fax: +34 86 812380 - Aptdo. 874 correo-e: gallego at uvigo.es - E-36201 VIGO ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU Mon Feb 16 17:06:05 1998 From: ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Ellen F. Prince) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 12:06:05 EST Subject: From Dan Everett Message-ID: Please send any replies to Dan Everett, dever at verb.linguist.pitt.edu. ------- Forwarded Message Subject: TOC - Journal of Amazonian Languages The second issue of Volume 1 of the Journal of Amazonian Languages is now in press and should be mailed out the second week of March. The articles in this issue are: 'The use of coreferential and reflexive markers in Tupi-Guarani languages', by Cheryl Jensen. (pp1-49) 'Aspects of ergativity in Marubo (Panoan), by Raquel Guimaraes R. Costa. (pp50-103) 'The acoustic correlates of stress in Piraha', by Keren M. Everett. (pp104-162). Requests for subscriptions may be sent to: Ms. Carolyn Anderson Department of Linguistics 2816 CL University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 ------- End of Forwarded Message From clements at INDIANA.EDU Mon Feb 16 22:06:40 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 17:06:40 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <34E8599D.593670D1@uvigo.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jose M. Garcia.Miguel wrote: > In any case, I think that we can not talk about ergativity if we don't > pay attention to > grammatical marking (agreement, case, ...). It is grammatical > grammatical marking what gives > ergative, accusative and active systems. We don't have an ergative > system relying only in the > semantic or discourse functions of S. This whole discussion started by my talking about ergative-type patterns in Spanish. I agree that Spanish is not an ergative language. I think, however, that there are suggestions of ergative-like patterns in the order of intrans. clause subjects and trans. clause objects. Also, there seems to be a move toward ergative patterning in pronominalization. In the big picture, Spanish may be moving toward such an ergative pattern, which at one point could become grammaticalized. The grammaticalization of discourse phenomena is not that uncommon. (Cf. the grammaticalization of preposing/posposing rules in VO --> OV shift for example). Clancy From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 17 01:55:29 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 20:55:29 -0500 Subject: Ergativity In-Reply-To: <199802160402.UAA22601@italy.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > My main reason for being skeptical I guess has to do with the fact that > non-human direct objects are for the most part excluded from being treated > (coded the same way) as indirect objects (both for the purpose of adding the > A or of having the "dative" LE clitic as opposed to the LO/LA "accusative" > clitic). If the syncretism was due to grammatical relation "congruence" (to > give it a name), I would expect it to apply to all direct objects, not just > to those with human referents. If you look at Klein Andreu's data, just this seems to be the case. For example: Rural speakers of Castilian: Animate masc. DOs 100% le Inanimate masc. DOs 76% le St. Teresa Animate masc. DOs 98% Inanimate masc. DOs 88% This is pretty high for inanimates, and points to an ever-increasing dominance of LE for DOs. Marcos Marin (1978:283) points to LE "invading the domain of the fem. DO". But I'm repeating myself. Jon asks: > This still leaves the mystery of why LE wasn't extended as readily to > masculine accusatives as to feminine ones, even while the "personal A" > extended equally to accusatives of both genders. It's not being extended equally to both genders. Rather, LE has taken over first masc. animate DOs, then masc. inanimate DOs, and now animate (and inanimate?) feminine DOs, according to Klein-Andreu and Marcos Marin's data. It's a gradual process, apparently. Saludos, Clancy From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 02:27:20 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:27:20 -0500 Subject: Ergativity & Chibchan In-Reply-To: <34E8599D.593670D1@uvigo.es> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jose M. Garcia.Miguel wrote: > Diego Quesada wrote: > > > In my work on Teribe, Rama, and Boruca -all three Chibchan > > languages of Central America- a similar pattern appears (only that the > > word-order types in running discourse are not as flexible as in Spanish): > > SOV discourse-initially, OSV/OVS -almost- elsewhere. > I'm doing right now some work on textual data of Chibchan languages of > Costa Rica -Bribri, Guatuso. They are OV languages, with variable order > of A, resulting as far as I now in AOV and OVA, **but not OAV**. [starrs mine, DQ] I never said that Bribri or Guatuso's alternative orders are OSV; in fact, I did not mention those two languages, cf. above. The alternative OVS order is for Boruca and Teribe; the alternative OSV is for Rama, from Nicaragua. > I'm > interested in the discourse factors that correlate with the position of > A, and especially in the factors that correlate with the presence or > absence of the ergative morpheme, which in this languages is sometimes > optional. I guess this has to do with topicality and with the > distinction between given and new information. Could you give me some > tips? I'm baking that cake too; so I might not wish to cut the cake before it is baked. But here is the basic thing for Boruca and Teribe: full NP's in the SOV and SV orders tend to appear discourse-initially. In most other instances both 0-anaphora or the alternative orders (VS/OVS) are commonplace. Just like in Spanish, full NP realization of referents here and there within a text is used for emphasis or desambiguation. A collection of Teribe texts (with Spanish glosses) by me is in press. As for the specifics of the invarible ergative-marking of Bribri, you'll have to contact A. Constenla: aconsten at cariari.ucr.ac.cr I'm not so sure that Guatuso has such a pattern of invariable ergativity- marking; Guatuso differs from the other Chibchan ergative languages in that it works more like the Mayan languages (it even has various antipassives -absent elsewhere in Central American Chibchaland- like those Mesoamerican languages). The reason, I suspect, has to do with the fact that ergativity marking in Guatuso (like in Mayan) is expressed in the agreement -cross referencing- system, while in the other Chibchan languages it is expressed by direct marking. Now, given that most Chibchan languages are highly "discourse-run" (lots of 0 anaphora; most tests for subjecthood such as gapping in coordination, etc. fail there; there is intermittent marking of grammatical categories such as plural, ergativity, even person in Teribe -which has a highly grammaticalized person agreement system), which means that marking of categories is intermittenty, applied only when needed, the presence/absence of "erg" in Bribri (and in its closest relative, Cabecar) -and to a lesser degree in Guatuso- depends, as you correctly suspect, on discourse-pragmatic aspects. For Bribri, too, you will have to contact Constenla, and also C. Jara cjara at cariari.ucr.ac.cr It goes without saying that the Journal Estudios de Linguistica Chibcha will be of great help. Saludos, Diego From clements at INDIANA.EDU Tue Feb 17 02:30:18 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 21:30:18 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... because-of say these things my grandmother "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... Any ideas about how to account for this would be most appreciated. Thanks, Clancy From aske at EARTHLINK.NET Tue Feb 17 03:49:38 1998 From: aske at EARTHLINK.NET (Jon Aske) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 22:49:38 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi, again, On Monday, February 16, 1998 9:30 PM J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) said: > I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented > response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and > gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > > Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... > because-of say these things my grandmother > "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > > *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... First of all I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is interefering with my Spanish here. But assuming Clancy's data is right, and it probably is for some dialect or another, I don't have a story for why it HAS to be this way, since I don't know the diachronic (hi)story of the construction, but I could make a plausible one up and say that this makes perfect sense once we realize that these are unasserted clauses and thus the notion topic is not relevant to them the way it is to asserted clauses. As I see it, a topic typically has an external subfunction--linking the proposition to the world of discourse--and an internal subfunction--serving as the base for the proposition (what the asserted proposition is about). Non asserted clauses may have linking elements, but only asserted clauses may have internal, predication topics. When these topics are expressed by full nominals they are typically clause initial (unless they are inverted, or antitopics). Now, since the notion topic (as well as the notion focus) is not really relevant to non-asserted clauses, it is not surprising that the subject is not preverbal, since preverbal position is typically correlated with topics in Spanish and postverbal position is associated with everything else. Now for the second part of this story (another motivation for the Por-VS order). Remember that in the majority of these non-asserted causal, POR setting clauses, the subject is elided, since it is coreferential with the subject of the asserted clause. This would motivate the "fusion", or "cliticization", or what-have-you of the POR subordinator and the infinitive, which then would motivate the avoidance of placing overt subjects in between when they are ocasionally present, since they are not topics anyway (sort of like the tendency not to "split infinitives" in English). How is that for a functionalist made-up story? Best, Jon PS Regarding the possibility of having a preverbal subject, I wonder if native speakers allow it in the finite versions of these non-asserted clauses, such as the following: Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. (as opposed to: Porque dijo estas cosas mi abuela, nos fuimos todos a casa. or Porque dijo mi abuela estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. ) To me it doesn't sound bad. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. --Plato, From W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE Tue Feb 17 11:04:40 1998 From: W.Schulze at LRZ.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (Wolfgang Schulze) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 12:04:40 +0100 Subject: QS: PRONUNS AND ERGATIVITY Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I'm currently working on a larger project on what I call "Categorial Typology" with respect to East Causian languages (ELCs). The output will be (I hope) a series of seven volumes entitled "Person, Klasse, Kongruenz - Fragmente einer Kategorialtypologie des einfachen Satzes in den ostkaukasischen Sprachen" ("PKK", to appear at Lincom (Munich)). The theoretical framework of PKK (called "Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios" ("GSS") is documented in the first volume ("Die Grundlagen", due 1998,II)), the following volumes treat the morphosyntax of ECLs with respect to specific categorial components derived from this framework (see my homepage for more, in case you are interested in things like this (http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/pkk1.htm)). Now, the second volume (PKK II, to appear 1998,III) deals with aspects of expressing "person" in ECLs. In order to substantiate some typological generalizations concerning personal pronouns and ergative case marking, I still collect data on ergativily marked pronouns in languages other than ECLs. What concerns me most are the following questions: In case, "your" language knows an ABS/ERG dichotomy for persnal pronouns: a) Are certain "persons" exempted from the ABS/ERG-dichotomy, in case the language in question has such a dichotomy in its pronominal system? E.g., in ECLs we can observe the follwing "splits", among others) (1 = Sg1, 2 = Sg2, 4= Pl1, 5 = Pl2, I = inclusive, e = exclusive): ABS/ERG yes no 1, 2, 4e, 5 4e 1, 2 4i, 4e, 5 4i, 4e, 5 1, 2 1 the rest 1, 4i the rest 2 the rest b) Is there a specific pronominal ergative marker different from the nominal one, and (in case: yes) how is the distribution of this marker (markers) with respect to a)? c) If there is/are (a) special pronominal ergative, do you know anything about the grammaticalization path for each of them? d) In case nominal ergative markers appear, are there any restriction with respect to "person"? E.g., in some ECL nominal ergative morphemes ooccur only with plural pronouns (or vice versa). e) In case the ("your") language has mono- or polypersonal agreement on the verb: ea) Is pronominal ergativity matched by the pronominal clitics (cf. the famous case of Tsova-Tush (Holisky 1987). Thus, do some or all persons have a ABS/ERG dichotomy via agreement paralleled by the pronominal paradigms? Are specific persons exempted fromthis dichotomy (most liley the inclusive)? eb) Is the degree of categorial differentiation found in the pronominal paradigm reflected in the corresponding agreement system (in other words: Do you have as many morphologically marked "persons" on the verb as proposed by the pronomil paradigm) If not: Is the agreement system over/underdifferentiated, and how? f) Does the language in question have an ergativily marked reflexive pronoun? g) Do you know of any system of noun classification that is sensible for SAPs? Cf. the Kubachi (Dargwa, ECL) example: 4 nus:a d-axul-da we.ABS CM-go.PR?S-non.Sg2 "We go." 5 u\s:a d-axul-da you.ABS CM-go.PR?S-non.Sg2 "You go." but 6 it:e b-axul-sa-b they[+hum] CM[+hum,+pl]-go.PR?S-AUX-CM[+hum,+pl] it:e d-axul-sa-d "They (the people) go." they[-hum] CM[-hum,+pl]-go.PR?S-AUX-CM[-hum,+pl] "They (the animals) go." It would be very nice if you could provide me with some information concerning these questions (in case you have them, and in case you find the time to describe them). Maybe that I have already stored the data. But it might as well be that something relevant escaped my eyes. Any reference (e.g. see this or that language...) would be very helpful, too. Naturally, I'll post a summary of the problem on the list. Thank you very much for your cooparation, Wolfgang ==================================================== = Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze = = Institut f?r Allgemeine und Indogermanische = = Sprachwissenschaft + Universit?t M?nchen = = Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 = = D-80539 M?nchen = = Tel.: +89-21802486 (secr.) = = +89-21802485 = = http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/ = ==================================================== From jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES Tue Feb 17 11:38:43 1998 From: jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES (Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 12:38:43 +0100 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, J. Clancy Clements wrote: >I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented >response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and >gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > >Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... >because-of say these things my grandmother >"Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > >*Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... And Jon Aske: >I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that >bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is >interefering with my Spanish here. I fully agree with the asterisk. Looking for a functional explanation, Jon suggests: >Now, since the notion topic (as well as the notion focus) is not really >relevant to non-asserted clauses, it is not surprising that the subject is >not preverbal, since preverbal position is typically correlated with topics >in Spanish and postverbal position is associated with everything else. But the issue is that such preverbal subjects are never allowed, asserted or non-asserted: (i) *Mi abuela decir estas cosas... If we consider Aske's last example (ii) we see that _mi abuela_ is in preverbal position, although _unasserted_: (ii) Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. So, despite things being much more complex, the reason may be formal, what explains Clements' difficulties. I do not mean there is not a functional explanation (there is always, soon or later, a functional explanation if one looks for it); what I mean is that in this case, as has been traditionally observed, the imposibility of a infinitival preverbal subject relates to a formal aspect: agreement. So, subject-agreement (or in generative terms, abstract nominative case assignation) is what licenses the subject. If there is no agreement (as in Spanish infinitives) there is not preverbal (licensed) suject. If my starred example (i) is used in an embedded clause, the subject will _raise_ to preverbal position: (iii) He oido a mi abuela decir estas cosas... This phenomenon is conceived of (in formalist contexts) as _exceptional case marking_ (it is assumed that the objective (abstract?) case of the main verb licenses the subject, that then raises). Then, the reason for the postverbal position of the subject in (iv) (iv) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... could be related to the unability of the non-agreeing infinitive to assign nominative case (i.e., to license its subject). Of course, what matters here is that I think that this (incompletely presented and old) formal explanation is in no way incompatible with that suggested by Jon, but that they are complementary. In this way, formal restrictions ensure the _functional role_ an utterance has to play, what does not mean that these formal restrictions should be necessarily reductible to that discursive/perceptive function. In other words, agreement could be functionally motivated in human languages, but not (unless rather indirectly) the position of infinitive subjects. Saludos cordiales, and, please, excuse my net-spanglish. _______________________________ Dr. Jose-Luis Mendivil Linguistica General Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) From Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU Tue Feb 17 14:43:27 1998 From: Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:43:27 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: Hi, Jose-Luis, welcome to the discussion. On Tuesday, February 17, 1998 6:39 AM Jose-Luis Mendivil Giro wrote: > I fully agree with the asterisk. OK, it must be Basque Spanish then. > (ii) Porque mi abuela dijo estas cosas, nos fuimos todos a casa. > > So, despite things being much more complex, the reason may be formal, what > explains Clements' difficulties. I do not mean there is not a functional > explanation (there is always, soon or later, a functional explanation if > one looks for it) Wow! Well, that's good to know. However, your resorting to "abstract nominative case assignation" to explain the postverbal position of the subject of the POR construction is not something I can live with (it sounds like hocus pocus to me, what can I say). Of course, formalists are free to posit anything they want and then transform it into whatever they want, but I really don't see how that explains anything. To me, and I would think that to most functionalists, such formal constructs are just not real. I realize I am not going to convince you of this, but I just had to say it. > If my starred example (i) is used in an embedded clause, the subject will > _raise_ to preverbal position: > > (iii) He oido a mi abuela decir estas cosas... >>From my perspective, raising is not an explanation for anything. The "underlying" structure that you say (iii) above comes from, namely (iv) below, doesn't exist anywhere, as far as I can see. The dative in (iii) is nothing but a complement of OIR (which, by the way, explains why "a mi abuela" can come before the infinitive clause, or even after it), which indeed controls the infinitival complement. I cannot accept that the nominal constituent "(a) mi abuela" is ever physically part of the lower clause. (iv) He oido [a mi abuela decir estas cosas]... I hope I haven't shocked anybody on this list by saying this. On the other hand, it is clear that some sort of restructuring and reanalysis is possible in this construction, ie the lower clause's boundaries are somewhat porous, which is why you can get things like (v) (v) He oido decir a mi abuela estas cosas... But this happens in many Spanish constructions. You may say that the notion of "porous boundaries" is hocus pocus, but that is only if you believe that boundaries and structure has a formal reality which is divorced from the semantic and/or pragmatic forces which bind elements of constructions together. Best, Jon > _______________________________ > Dr. Jose-Luis Mendivil > Linguistica General > Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) > """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it. --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From macw at CMU.EDU Tue Feb 17 15:55:35 1998 From: macw at CMU.EDU (Brian MacWhinney) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 10:55:35 -0500 Subject: subject in nonfinite clauses Message-ID: To my extremely non-native ears, the problem with (1) is that there is a tendency to pull off "por mi abuela" as a separate phrase. This would then lead to a possible interpretation in which there is some other subject of "decir." In the case of (2) no such temptation arises. (1) *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas ... (2) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela ... In other words (1) could be parsed with a comma intonation after "abuela". I realize that this is not "para mi abuela", but still there are plenty of preposed "por + nominal" phrases in Spanish. Many more than would be possible in English, for example. It would seem to me that sticking with (2) is simply an excellent way of avoiding any garden paths in sentence interpretation. This seems to me like a straightforward functionalist account of this pattern. --Brian MacWhinney From msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX Tue Feb 17 16:02:08 1998 From: msoto at SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX (Ricardo Maldonado) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 10:02:08 -0600 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish Message-ID: A few more clarifications. When I suggested the existence of competition strategies to disambiguate double "a" constructions I did so in reference to Clancy?s crucial argument about deleting "a" in the context of DO/ IO coexistence. The crucial point was that "demoting" the IO to an oblique was the best way to avoid "a" repetition. Now, I am glad Clancy found the same type of reaction from native speakers about the naturalness of "Juan le presenta Luisa a Marta". Since Diego said that "> (1) sounds perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence" I thought there would be an interesting dialect contrast between Mexico and Spain vs Costa Rica. However I checked with Costa Rican friends at the University of Casta Rica and the example was rejected or seen as rather strange by everyone. Thus I Agree with Clancy in that we cannot trust overt NP?s and the interesting issue the is clitic LE. 2) I am quite happy that my clarification on "Visitar a Paris" generated a discussion of something I did not say. I did not say that the ONLY function of "a" was marking human objects, I just pointed out that in that example "Paris" would be read as affected by the process. I agree with Diego that once the definiteness of the object idea hit the ground everybody forgot about the basic human value of personal "a". Outdated as the unique explanation, I believe that the human object interpretation accounts for an important set of data. Indeed I believe that there is an important gradation going from designating a human definite object to signaling an definite non-human object. The cline is determined, I believe, by the semantics of the verb. Being that "visitar" has a strong requirement for human objects the use of "a" will strengthen that interpretation. Now, about Diego?s example > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... >> >Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does >not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of >(1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], >there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). I would like to know when was this written beacuse the racist interpretation may be in fact quite insightful. Recent analysis by Marcela Flores on LE/Lo contrast (there is a paper submitted to Romance Philology) where she proves that in Colonial Spanish there are important contrasts in which LO is in fact used to refer to people of lower status whereas LE is used for those in upper scales of Colonial society. Indians were referred by Spaniards, as we can all expect, with LO not with LE. Chances are Diego?s example could have the same or similar (racist) motivation. Let us not forget, as Jon pointed out, that LE and LA were already used at the time (and in some current dialects it still is) to mark social differences between males and females. The use of the LE/LO contrast to mark status differences is still exploited in all dialects of Spanish as we all know. The more formal the situation is the more LE tends to be used. So in: 1) Le esperamos 2) Lo esperamos 1) is prefered for formal situations (Radio transmission, wedding invitations and such). This is of course no news to anybody. Seminal work by Erica Garcia since 1975 has pointed out this basic contrast. Since the text cited by Diego is a hisotrical source maybe he can help us with more information about it. To prevent misunderstandings, I don?t believe it explains the whole grammaticalization process discussed by Jon and Diego. I only think this explanation adds an angle not previously considered in this discussion. Best regards to all of you. Ricardo Maldonado Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM 2a de Cedros 676, Jurica Mexico, Queretaro 76100 tel (52) (42) 18 02 64 fax (52) (42) 18 68 78 msoto at servidor.unam.mx From annes at HTDC.ORG Tue Feb 17 19:05:53 1998 From: annes at HTDC.ORG (Anne Sing) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:05:53 -1000 Subject: NLP AND THE BEST THEORY OF SYNTAX Message-ID: To the readers: On March 17th I will be giving a talk at the University of Hawaii's Linguistic Department Tuesday Seminar called, "The Best Theory of Syntax." In this talk I intend to make the rather non-controversial point that, the best theory of syntax must necessarily be the one that demonstrates itself to be most completely implemented in a programming language. I am writing to the group to ask for references, obscure or otherwise, where this basic proposition has been put forth before in the literature or through personal communications. Comments, criticism, and discussion of this argument are also welcome. I will post a summary of the references to the list. (Be sure and mention if you do not want your name mentioned in the summary). Some might argue that I am merely putting complex arguments into simple language but these arguments have substance and effect in either simple or complex langauge. This is especially true when we are dealing with the application of syntax to a multi-billion dollar industry such as NLP. More specifically, I intend to present the arguement that the best independent and objective measure of a theory of syntax' overall effectiveness is its ability to generate, in a computer program, standard grammatical structures and to manipulate these structures in the same way as users of the language being described. That is, I intend to argue that the best theory of syntax is the one that produces the best parsers. Following that I will present a very ordinary set of standards for the evaluation of parsers and then based on the comparison of theories using those standards, I will argue that the theory of syntax that underlies the Ergo Linguistic Technologies' parser is the best theory of syntax and that all others should be relegated to the scrap heap of "wannabe" theories until such time as they can produce equal or better parsers. The logic that I will present to support this is: 1) if there is ever to be a way to determine which of the competing, extant theories of syntax is preferable to the others, there must be an independent and objective means of weighing the relative value and completeness of these theories in terms of their ability to accomplish the tasks they were originally designed for. Specifically, there must be an independent and objective means of verifying which theories are indeed most capable of expressing all and only those generalizations about language that describe and explain the observed facts of their structure. 2) since computers have the ability to represent and execute binary algorithms, any theory that is composed of binary algorithms should be able to be implemented in a programming language. Thus, any theory of syntax that has reached a level of maturity should be able to represent its generalizations in working parsers. In fact all programming languages and compilers are based on early syntactic discoveries like phrase structure rules and Noam Chomsky is the default reference for much of the early work, and have already demonstrated their aptness for this sort of comparison. 3) the degree to which a theory of syntax and its algorithms cannot be implemented in a programming language is the degree to which that theory and its algorithms have not been completely or correctly worked out and should not be considered a mature enough theory to be included in the discussion of which theory is to be preferred. 4) the theory which is most thoroughly worked out will naturally have the most thorough and comprehensive parsing programs associated with it, and for that reason is to be considered the best theory of syntax as determined by this independent, objective criteria. I will also propose a method for judging which theories have been "best" implemented in a programming language. Specifically, I will argue that the standards described below are the minimum standards that a theory of syntax would have to parse in order to be able say that it had reached some level of maturity and also this same set of criteria would be used to determine exactly which theories of syntax had most effectively accomplished the task of modeling the mechanisms that generate all and only the sentences of a language. In addition, the comparison of individual parses will of course use the Penn Treebank II guidelines established by the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. Of course, any theory of syntax, whatever its assumptions and methods, should be able to translate its structures into the Penn Treebank style if their work is thorough and complete. The ability to generate these labeled brackets and trees in itself constitutes a good test of a theories maturity. The motivation for such comparisons and standards is of course to provide an independent and objective means of evaluation of the merits and relative success of research in this area that can be judged and discussed not only by those with a particular theoretical orientation, but also by those with different theoretical backgrounds, those in different areas of linguistics, and of course those from fields outside of linguistics who need to evaluate and discuss such materials. THE STANDARDS: In addition to using the Penn Treebank II guidelines for the generation of trees and labeled brackets and a dictionary that is at least 35,000 words in size and works in real time and handles sentences up to 15 to 20 words in length, we suggest that NLP parsers should also meet standards in the following seven areas before being considered "complete." The seven areas are: 1) the structural analysis of strings, 2) the evaluation of acceptable strings, 3) the manipulation of strings, 4) question/answer, statement/response repartee, 5) command and control, 6) the recognition of the essential identity of ambiguous structures, and 7) lexicography. (These same criteria have been proposed for the coordination of animations with NLP with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language Consortium--a consortium (whose standards were recently accepted by the ISO) designed to standardize 3D environments. (See http://www.vrml.org/WorkingGroups/NLP- ANIM). It is important to recognize that EAGLES and the MUC conferences, groups that are charged with the responsibility of developing standards for NLP do not mention any of the following criteria and instead limit themselves to largely general characteristics of user acceptance or vague categories such as "rejects ungrammatical input" rather than specific proposals detailed in terms of syntactic and grammatical structures and functions that are to be rejected or accepted. The EAGLES site is made up of hundreds of pages of introductory material that is very confusing and difficult to navigate; however, once you actually find the few standards that are being proposed you will find that they do not come close to the level of precision and depth that is being proposed here and for that reason should be rejected until such time as these higher and more demanding levels of expectation of the NLP systems is included there as well. These are serious matters and a group like EAGLES should not ignore extant NLP tools simply because they are not mainstream or because mainstream parsers cannot meet these requirements (evnthough the Ergo parser is better known than almost all other parsers). Just go through their pages and try to find EXACTLY what a parser is expected to do under these guidelines. There is almost no reference to specific grammatical structures, the Penn Treebank II guidelines, or references to current working parsers as models (http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES/home.html). If the EAGLES' standards are ever to gain any credibility and respect they are going to have to be far more specific about grammatical and syntactic phenomena that a system can and cannot support. There should also be some requirement that the systems being judged offer a demonstration of their abilities to generate labeled brackets and trees in the style of the Penn Treebank II guidelines. I suggest the following as a far more exacting and far more demanding test of systems than is offered by EAGLES or any of the MUC conferences. HERE IS A BRIEF PRESENTATION OF STANDARDS IN THOSE SEVEN AREAS: 1. At a minimum, from the point of view of the STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF STRINGS, the parser should:, 1) identify parts of speech, 2) identify parts of sentence, 3) identify internal clauses (what they are and what their role in the sentence is as well as the parts of speech, parts of sentence and so on of these internal clauses), 4) identify sentence type (without using punctuation), 5) identify tense and voice in main and internal clauses, and 6) do 1-5 for internal clauses. 2. At a minimum from the point of view of EVALUATION OF STRINGS, the parser should: 1) recognize acceptable strings, 2) reject unacceptable strings, 3) give the number of correct parses identified, 4) identify what sort of items succeeded (e.g. sentences, noun phrases, adjective phrases, etc), 5) give the number of unacceptable parses that were tried, and 6) give the exact time of the parse in seconds. 3. At a minimum, from the point of view of MANIPULATION OF STRINGS, the parser should: 1) change yes/no and information questions to statements and statements to yes/no and information questions, 2) change actives to passives in statements and questions and change passives to actives in statements and questions, and 3) change tense in statements and questions. 4. At a minimum, based on the above basic set of abilities, any such device should also, from the point of view of QUESTION/ANSWER, STATEMENT/RESPONSE REPARTEE, he parser should: 1) identify whether a string is a yes/no question, wh-word question, command or statement, 2) identify tense (and recognize which tenses would provide appropriate responses, 3) identify relevant parts of sentence in the question or statement and match them with the needed relevant parts in text or databases, 4) return the appropriate response as well as any sound or graphics or other files that are associated with it, and 5) recognize the essential identity between structurally ambiguous sentences (e.g. recognize that either "John was arrested by the police" or "The police arrested John" are appropriate responses to either, "Was John arrested (by the police)" or "Did the police arrest John?"). 5. At a minimum from the point of view of RECOGNITION OF THE ESSENTIAL IDENTITY OF AMBIGUOUS STRUCTURES, the parser should recognize and associate structures such as the following: 1) existential "there" sentences with their non-there counterparts (e.g. "There is a dog on the porch," "A dog is on the porch"), 2) passives and actives, 3) questions and related statements (e.g. "What did John give Mary" can be identified with "John gave Mary a book."), 4) Possessives should be recognized in three forms, "John's house is big," "The house of John is big," "The house that John has is big," 5) heads of phrases should be recognized as the same in non-modified and modified versions ("the tall thin man in the office," "the man in the office," the tall man in the office" and the tall thin man in the office" should be recognized as referring to the same man (assuming the text does not include a discussion of another, "short man" or "fat man" in which case the parser should request further information when asked simply about "the man")), and 6) others to be decided by the group. 6. At a minimum from the point of view of COMMAND AND CONTROL, the parser should: 1) recognize commands, 2) recognize the difference between commands for the operating system and commands for characters or objects, and 3) recognize the relevant parts of the commands in order to respond appropriately. 7. At a minimum from the point of view of LEXICOGRAPHY, the parser should: 1) have a minimum of 50,000 words, 2) recognize single and multi-word lexical items, 3) recognize a variety of grammatical features such as singular/plural, person, and so on, 4) recognize a variety of semantic features such as +/-human, +/-jewelry and so on, 5) have tools that facilitate the addition and deletion of lexical entries, 6) have a core vocabulary that is suitable to a wide variety of applications, 7) be extensible to 75,000 words for more complex applications, and 8) be able to mark and link synonyms. THE CONCLUSIONS I WILL DRAW FROM THIS ARE: 1) the theory that underlies the software at Ergo Linguistic Technologies is not only the best theory of syntax, but is the ONLY theory of syntax that has reached a sufficiently developed state to even attempt the standards described here. 2) those who do not mention this theory in their research proposals, grant applications, publications and so on are guilty of negligence (and could be sued if there are grants, contracts, jobs, or other such items of material value at stake and where the offerer of these jobs, grants, etc has reason to expect that the applicant is an expert in his field and is providing an accurate picture of the competitive environment). In addition, computational linguistics departments who do not mention these tools or use tools of this calibre are remiss in their duty to present the full range of available materials to their students. 3) All current theories of syntax such as Chomsky's latest or even older versions of his theory HPSG, LFG, etc. should all be relegated to the scrap heap of "wannabe" systems until such time as they have been worked out in sufficient detail to allow the creation of programs that can execute their algorithms to the degree required by the above standards. (I do not want to imply that the use of these theories to analyze the worlds' languages cannot or has not contributed greatly to the store of knowledge about the nature of the world's langauges. As a matter of fact the theory that we are working with owes a tremendous debt to all the work that has come before it in the form of these earlier theories. The only problem is that these other theories have not yet completed their basic research and have not yet reached a level of sufficient maturity to work with the standards described above and for that reason can only be considered works in progress or "wannabe" theories.) I will finish my UH talk with a demonstration of the software that has been developed from our theory of syntax focusing on demonstrations from the seven standards described above and handouts from the output of other parsers. In addition to our standard demo as seen on our web site http://www.ergo-ling.com), I will use the tools called "The BracketDoctor" (a device that generates labeled brackets and trees in the style of the Penn Treebank II guidelines) "The English Sentence Enhancer" (an ESL grammar checker) "The Logic Doctor" (a program that handles first order predicate calculus, syllogistic reasoning, inferrencing and basic logic) and "The Q&A Demo" ( a program that shows our ability to handle question/answer, statement/response repartee) to demonstrate our strengths using the Penn Treebank II style trees and labeled brackets as well as practical illustrations to demonstrate the abilities of our theory of syntax in those seven areas. (All these tools except the "Logic Doctor" and the "Q&A Demo" are available for free download from our web site at http://www.ergo-ling.com or by email by writing me at bralich at hawaii.edu. These are Windows 95 programs that fit on one disk and can be installed with a standard setup function from WIN95.) Please be advised that these programs are copyrighted and patent pending. In sum, I would like to know of references and to receive comments in support of or against the following argument: 1) that computers are the ideal devices for comparing different theories' abilities to model the phenomena they seek to describe (all and only the grammatical sentences of a languga); 2) that any theory that can not be fully implemented in a programming language as described in the standards outlined above, is flawed in some way; and 3) that the best independent and objective measure of a theories scope, efficiency, and effectiveness is the degree to which it can be implemented in a programming language. (Of course, the basis for judgement will be the Penn Treebank II guidelines and the standards described above). Then based on the ability of the Ergo Linguistic's tools to compete in all the standards, I suggest that the theories of Brame, Chomsky, Kaplan and Bresnen, Pollard and Sag, Starosta, et al be set aside until such time as they can be shown to generate programs that are as good or better than those produced at Ergo Linguistic Technologies' offices. Phil Bralich P.S. We recommend that you download these tools and take them with you (on a lap top is best of course) to any linguistics, NLP, Computational Linguistics, MT, or logic conference or workshop that will discuss work in these areas. It should provide you with an interesting source of comparison material as well as with some interesting and challenging questions for the presenters. Of course, this may also be of value for students in their classes. Linguistics and Computer Science departments that are currently not committed to any particular theory of syntax or approach might want to consider collaborative involvements with this theory as a means of producing commercially viable products and as a source of research grants. You may also wish to compare results in published reports with results that these tools provide. You may also want to email copies of one or more of these tools to classmates, teachers, and co-workers (please avoid sending them to competitors like a big bunch of unordered pizzas). P.P.S. As the field of linguistics is dominated by very intelligent, very informed individuals who are also quite competitive, you can measure the success of this argument on the field overall by the reactions of the readers to this post--the smaller the response, the higher the acceptance (begrudging though it may be). That is, people are certainly willing to criticize any argument they can, but they merely keep quiet if they cannot. Praise for a competitor's arguments is not likely. Thus, a lack of criticism should be interpreted as acceptance of these arguments. Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, Ph.D. President and CEO Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 Tel: (808)539-3920 Fax: (808)539-3924 Philip A. Bralich, President Ergo Linguistic Technologies 2800 Woodlawn Drive, Suite 175 Honolulu, HI 96822 tel:(808)539-3920 fax:(880)539-3924 From gallego at UVIGO.ES Tue Feb 17 19:14:50 1998 From: gallego at UVIGO.ES (Jose M. Garcia.Miguel) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 20:14:50 +0100 Subject: Ergativity & Chibchan Message-ID: Diego Quesada escribi?: > Now, given that most Chibchan > languages are highly "discourse-run" (...), which means that marking of > categories is > intermittenty, applied only when needed, the presence/absence of "erg" in > Bribri (and in its closest relative, Cabecar) -and to a lesser degree in > Guatuso- depends, as you correctly suspect, on discourse-pragmatic > aspects. > The point is that just like ergative marking correlates with low animacy and/or low definiteness of NPs in split-ergative systems, I suspect that optional ergative marking in A NP correlates with low topicality or new information in some Chibchan languages (and, probably, in other languages). Does anybody know of other languages in which variable ergative marking directly correlates with discourse factors? Do they support / reject such a correlation? Saludos -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Jose M. Garcia-Miguel Linguistica Xeral Departamento de Traduccion, Linguistica e Teoria da Literatura Tfno: +34 86 812355 - Universidade de Vigo Fax: +34 86 812380 - Aptdo. 874 correo-e: gallego at uvigo.es - E-36201 VIGO ------------------------------------------------------------------------- From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 20:47:53 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 15:47:53 -0500 Subject: Ergativity and objects in Spanish In-Reply-To: <199802171602.KAA17343@servidor.unam.mx> Message-ID: I will merely clarify two things: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Ricardo Maldonado wrote: > Now, I am glad Clancy found the same type of reaction from native speakers > about the naturalness of > "Juan le presenta Luisa a Marta". Since Diego said that "> (1) sounds > perfectly unmarked and natural to my Costa Rican native competence" I > thought there would be an interesting dialect contrast between Mexico and > Spain vs Costa Rica. However I checked with Costa Rican friends at the > University of Casta Rica and the example was rejected or seen as rather > strange by everyone. The example (1) that sounded- -and still sounds- perfectly natural to me is not the one from Clancy: "Juan le..." but rather the one below: > Now, about Diego?s example > > > > (1) La amenaza de confiscarles los indios... Yes, this one. > >Unless one would take the rather racist and odd view that 'indios' does > >not refer to referents which are human, topical, but which in the case of > >(1) compete for topicality with the referents of 'le' [los encomenderos], > >there is no way to account for the absence of 'a' in (1). > > I would like to know when was this written beacuse the racist interpretation > may be in fact quite insightful. Recent analysis by Marcela Flores on LE/Lo > contrast (there is a paper submitted to Romance Philology) where she proves > that in Colonial Spanish there are important contrasts in which LO is in > fact used to refer to people of lower status whereas LE is used for those in > upper scales of Colonial society. Indians were referred by Spaniards, as we > can all expect, with LO not with LE. Chances are Diego?s example could have > the same or similar (racist) motivation. The text was written in 1993 by Elizabeth Fonseca, a CR historian very much against the abuses of the conquista, so the racist explanation is N/A. > Since the text > cited by Diego is a hisotrical source maybe he can help us with more > information about it. See above. Saludos, Diego From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 22:55:24 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 17:55:24 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: <199802170349.TAA22306@germany.it.earthlink.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, Jon Aske wrote: > Hi, again, > > On Monday, February 16, 1998 9:30 PM J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) said: > > > I have another question which I can't figure out a functionalist-oriented > > response to. In Spanish, nonfinite clauses (i.e. infinitival and > > gerundive clauses) cannot have a subject preverbally. For example, > > > > Por decir estas cosas mi abuela... > > because-of say these things my grandmother > > "Because of my grandmother saying these things..." > > > > *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas... > > First of all I must say that this last starred clause doesn't sound all that > bad to me, so let me hear from other speakers. Maybe some other language is > interefering with my Spanish here. My black-box agrees with Jon's assessment of the preinfinitival subject. I hear things like this all the time (1) Por vos andar de hocicon ahora... (2) Por Juan estar de guardia ese dia... In the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean places, one hears (3) Para yo saber que tu dices (4) Para tu decirme si esta bien. Diego From dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Tue Feb 17 22:59:04 1998 From: dquesada at CHASS.UTORONTO.CA (Diego Quesada) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 17:59:04 -0500 Subject: subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: <19309594.3096701735@jubilation.psy.cmu.edu> Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Brian MacWhinney wrote: > To my extremely non-native ears, the problem with (1) is that there is a > tendency to pull off "por mi abuela" as a separate phrase. This would then > lead to a possible interpretation in which there is some other subject of > "decir." In the case of (2) no such temptation arises. > > (1) *Por mi abuela decir estas cosas ... > (2) Por decir estas cosas mi abuela ... > > In other words (1) could be parsed with a comma intonation after "abuela". > I realize that this is not "para mi abuela", but still there are plenty of > preposed "por + nominal" phrases in Spanish. Many more than would be > possible in English, for example. In none of the four (and many more) cases I provided in a previous message (two with 'por' and two with 'para' is there the least sign of a pause. Hence, the explanation falls short here. Diego From clements at INDIANA.EDU Wed Feb 18 01:20:36 1998 From: clements at INDIANA.EDU (J. Clancy Clements (Kapil)) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 20:20:36 -0500 Subject: position of subject in nonfinite clauses In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Feb 1998, Diego Quesada wrote: > My black-box agrees with Jon's assessment of the preinfinitival > subject. I hear things like this all the time > > (1) Por vos andar de hocicon ahora... > > (2) Por Juan estar de guardia ese dia... > > In the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean places, one hears > > (3) Para yo saber que tu dices > > (4) Para tu decirme si esta bien. Caribbean Spanish allows this. Correct. Castilian Spanish allows it marginally. For example, Diego's (2) and (4) are bad in CS, whereas (3) is somewhat better. The following varieties allow it marginally: Mexican (non-Caribbean), Argentinan, Chilean. I'm not sure about Peruvian, Bolivian, etc. The question can now be recast: what functional explanation can there be for the more unrestricted presence of it in some dialects, and the marginal presence of it in other dialects? Note: the presence of it in CS and other varieties seems to have to do with the realization of the subject: if it's a full NP, it's worse, if it's a pronoun, it's not as bad. This is a GENERAL characterization, which for a functional analysis is not helpful because it's not possible to see how things function in a general characterization of a phenomenon. Still, if anyone has an idea, functionally, why some varieties tend to disallow it and other varieties allow it, I really like to hear it. Thanks in advance (and to Brian M. for his response). Clancy From Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU Wed Feb 18 03:41:10 1998 From: Jon.Aske at SALEM.MASS.EDU (Jon Aske) Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 22:41:10 -0500 Subject: Ergativity Message-ID: On Monday, February 16, 1998 5:07 PM, J. Clancy Clements (Kapil) wrote: > This whole discussion started by my talking about ergative-type patterns > in Spanish. I agree that Spanish is not an ergative language. I think, > however, that there are suggestions of ergative-like patterns in the order > of intrans. clause subjects and trans. clause objects. Also, there seems > to be a move toward ergative patterning in pronominalization. In the big > picture, Spanish may be moving toward such an ergative pattern, which at > one point could become grammaticalized. The grammaticalization of > discourse phenomena is not that uncommon. (Cf. the grammaticalization of > preposing/posposing rules in VO --> OV shift for example). Clancy, I hope I'm not being too persistent, but I am just trying to understand your position and to find out what I may be missing: I think that even if we wanted to call this weak ordering correlation between S and O ergative (which I wouldn't want to, for reasons I already tried to explain), as far as I know, no language has ever developed grammatical ergativity from such a pattern. (Also, as far as I know, grammatical ergative coding is never manifested as a word order pattern, but as case marking or verbal correferencing. Perhaps I'm wrong.) In other words, I have not heard before of a language grammaticalizing this type of ordering pattern, so that it results in all, or most, S constituents become postverbal--thus patterning with the O's--while the A's remain preverbal. I have not heard of grammatical(ized) ergativity arising that way and I don't think it's possible either, for the simple reason that this correlation has a clear functional basis (focus position) of a kind that doesn't seem to be easily obscured or extended (reanalyzed). Also, I still don't understand why the fact that human accusatives are coded like datives in Spanish is a reflection of ergative patterning. Thanks, Jon PS I am familiar with DuBois' claims that the absolutive is typically the overt argument in narrative in some (grammatically ergative) languages, but I have not been able to duplicate those results in any language that I mostly work on (Basque, English, Spanish), so I remain skeptical about the generality of this finding, and in particular about this property (being coded by a full nominal) being the source of grammatical ergativity. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Jon Aske Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu - aske at earthlink.net Department of Foreign Languages Salem State College Salem, Massachusetts 01970 http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/ """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. --Plato From holton at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU Sun Feb 22 01:15:41 1998 From: holton at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU (Gary Holton) Date: Sat, 21 Feb 1998 17:15:41 -0800 Subject: Second Call: Santa Barbara WAIL Message-ID: **** CALL FOR PAPERS **** Workshop on American Indigenous Languages Santa Barbara, CA May 9-10, 1998 The linguistics department at the University or California, Santa Barbara issues a call for papers to be presented at its first annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL). The workshop will be a forum for the discussion of theoretical and descriptive linguistic studies of indigenous languages of the Americas. The workshop will take place on Saturday and Sunday May 9-10, 1998 on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our invited speakers will be Nicola Bessell, Wallace Chafe, and Marianne Mithun. Dr. Bessell has worked extensively on the phonetics/phonology interface in Coeur d'Alene Salish. Dr. Chafe's current research involves documentation of the Seneca and Caddo languages. He is also writing a popular book on the importance of Native American languages. Dr. Mithun has just completed a book on the Languages of North America for the green series put out by Cambridge University Press. Anonymous abstracts are invited for talks on any topic in linguistics. Talks will be 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Individuals may submit abstracts for one single and one co-authored paper. Abstracts should be one page with a 500 word limit. A separate page for data and references may be included, if necessary. Abstracts may be submitted in hardcopy or by email. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is March 15, 1998. For hardcopy submittal, please send four copies of your anonymous one-page abstract. In the envelope, include a 3x5 card with the following information: a. name b. affiliation c. mailing address d. phone number e. e-mail address f. title of your paper Hardcopy abstracts should be mailed to: Workshop on American Indigenous Languages Department of Linguistics University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106 Email submissions are encouraged. To submit an abstract by email, the information that would be included on the 3x5 card should be in the body of the email message, with the anonymous abstract sent as an attachment. Email abstracts should be sent to: wail at humanitas.ucsb.edu DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ABSTRACTS: March 15, 1998 Notification of acceptance will be by email in mid-March. General Information Santa Barbara is situated on the Pacific Ocean near the Santa Ynez mountains. The UCSB campus is located near the Santa Barbara airport, and is approximately 90 miles north of LAX airport in Los Angeles. Shuttle buses run from LAX to Santa Barbara several times each day. Information about hotel accomodations will be provided on request. Crash space for participants may be available with graduate students in the UCSB linguistics department for those who arrange early. WAIL is co-sponsored by the UCSB linguistics department and the department's Native American Indian Languages (NAIL) study group, which has been meeting regularly in Santa Barbara since 1990, providing a forum for the discussion of issues relating to Native American language and culture. For further information contact the conference coordinator at wail at humanitas.ucsb.edu or (805) 893-3776. From tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU Fri Feb 20 22:18:02 1998 From: tpayne at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU (Tom Payne) Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 14:18:02 -0800 Subject: Lexicography Workshop Message-ID: The Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oregon, as part of its regular offerings, will be sponsoring a lexicography workshop from 23 June to 14 August, 1998. The workshop will be led by Valentin Vydrine, of the European University of St. Petersburg, Russia. Dr. Vydrine is a specialist in the lexicography of West Africa, and is corrently compiling a massive comparative dictionary of the Manding languages. This workshop will be designed for all linguistic and anthropological fieldworkers who are in the process of preparing a dictionary of an underdescribed language. Oregon SIL also offers a variety of graduate and undergraduate level courses in field-oriented linguistics, including a "Workshop in Grammatical Description." For more information on the workshops and other offerings of the Summer Institute of Linguistics at Oregon, please check out our web page at http://www.sil.org/schools/oregon/oregon.html or contact Tom Payne (tpayne at oregon.uoregon.edu) Thank you. _____________________________________________________________________ Thomas E. Payne, Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403, USA Voice: 541 342-6706. Fax: 541 346-3917 ______________________________________________________________________ From john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL Tue Feb 24 09:37:43 1998 From: john at RESEARCH.HAIFA.AC.IL (John Myhill) Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 11:37:43 +0200 Subject: No subject Message-ID: To who may have the information I'm looking for, (1) I read an article by John Hinds once called (I think) `Paragraph structure and pronominalization' (or something like that) but I can't remember where and I don't seem to have any copies of it any more. Does anyone out there know where this article was published? (2) Could anyone please tell me Robert King's email address? Thanks very much. John Myhill From mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL Thu Feb 26 10:01:07 1998 From: mbuijs at RULLET.LEIDENUNIV.NL (Michel Buijs) Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 11:01:07 +0100 Subject: Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics (Update) Message-ID: Dear colleagues, I would like to inform you all that an updated version of my Bibliography of Ancient Greek Linguistics is now available at: http://wwwlet.leidenuniv.nl/www.let.data/gltc/michel/bgl.html With regards, Michel Buijs |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Drs Michel Buijs Classics Department Leiden University P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands Phone: +31 (0)71 - 527 2774 Fax: +31 (0)71 - 527 2615 E-mail: mbuijs at rullet.leidenuniv.nl |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| From yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH Sat Feb 28 06:21:32 1998 From: yui at IPIED.TU.AC.TH (Yuphaphann Hoonchamlong) Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 13:21:32 +0700 Subject: John Hinds' artcicle In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, John Myhill wrote: > To who may have the information I'm looking for, > (1) I read an article by John Hinds once called (I think) `Paragraph > structure and pronominalization' (or something like that) but I can't > remember where and I don't seem to have any copies of it any more. Does > anyone out there know where this article was published? References of 3 works by John Hinds that I know of: 1) Conversational structure: An Investigation based on Japanese interview discourse in John Hinds & I howard (eds), problems in Japanese Syntax and semantics. Tokyo 1978 2) Aspects of Japanese Discourse Stucture. Tokyo 1976. 3) Conversational Interaction in Central Thai. 1992. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Language and Linguistics. Thammasat University, thailand. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Yuphaphann "Yui" Hoonchamlong yui at alpha.tu.ac.th Dept. of Linguistics yui at ipied.tu.ac.th Thammasat University http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/yui/ Bangkok, Thailand Thai Language Audio resource Center http://thaiarc.tu.ac.th/