Interpreting ergative sentences

[Eduard Selleslagh]

-----Original Message-----
From: CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU <CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 3:06 AM

>Dear Pat and everyone else,

[snip]

>This is actually quite like what often happens with experiencer and
>beneficiary verbs in accusative languages.  The fact that e.g. Spanish
>makes the patient the morphological and syntactic subject of a verb
>does not mean that an English translator must do the same.  _No me
>gusta la mu'sica_ does not mean 'the music doesn't please me' -- that
>translation suggests that someone was trying to please (or perhaps
>annoy) me with the music.  Rather, it means, very precisely, 'I don't
>like the music': the Spanish doesn't insinuate that anyone was thinking
>of me, so neither should the translation.

[Snip]

>Leo

[Ed Selleslagh]

First of all, thank you for this excellent piece of work.

Speaking about Castilian, I would like to have your views on a peculiarity,
or rather a tendency, that is still productive at least in popular speech
('le-ismo'), namely the tendency to use the indirect subject form where all
other Latin (and other West-European) languages use the direct object form,
and almost exclusively with persons (animate), e.g. "le ví" ("le vi' "), "I
saw him".
It has sometimes be suggested that this was a substrate influence from
Basque, an ergative language (that lacks an accusative, of course), but
opinions are extremely divided on this subject. On the other hand, it seems
to me this could (but I don't know) also be related to some of the arguments
presented in the discussion on ergative/accusative concerning the distinct
role of animates.

Ed.