Ergative & Basque

[Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen]

On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen wrote:

>> [...] Can "Mutila jo zuen" not
>> *come from* something which *originally* meant, not 'the boy was
>> hit' pure and simple, but specifically 'the boy was hit by him
>> (e.g., by the one we're talking about)'? [...]

> [LT:]
> Well, this suggestion is possible, I suppose, but I know of no evidence
> to support it, while there is some evidence against it.  Let's look at
> the structure of the Basque sentence.

[JER:]
How can it be possible, if there is evidence against it? This is
getting intriguing now.

[LT:]
> Here <mutil> is `boy', and <-a> is the article.  This NP, being a direct
> object, stands in the absolutive case, which has case-suffix zero.

> The item <jo> is the perfective participle of the verb `hit'.

> And <zuen> is the auxiliary verb-form.  Now, third person is usually
> marked by zero in Basque verbs.  So, the usual absolutive agreement
> slot, which is the first slot in the auxiliary, cannot be filled by an
> agreement marker, and it is filled instead by <z->, a redundant marker
> of past tense.  The next element, <-u->, is a reduced form of the verbal
> root <-du->, from *<edun> `have'; this is the usual transitive
> auxiliary.  Again, the ergative agreement slot, which follows the verbal
> root, is empty, because the ergative (subject) NP is third-person.
> Finally, <-en> marks past tense.

> The whole thing is thus this:

> 	boy-the-Abs hit-Perf Past-have-0-Past

> Or, roughly, `(She/he/it) had hit the boy.'

> But it translates English `S/he hit the boy' (before today).  This is a
> periphrastic form comparable to the ones we find in Romance and
> Germanic.  Nobody knows if such periphrastic forms are calqued on
> Romance or are an independent development in Basque.

> Now, I can see little scope here either for an original passive
> interpretation of the form or for any way of reading `by him' into the
> auxiliary form.

[JER:]
If there is no passive expressed as belonging to the agent in this, what
then is the "have" verb doing here? Can't the underlying construction be
analyzed in a sensible way at all? A silly question from a complete
outsider: is the translation "have" internally motivated? Can it express
the "having" of anything other than a "participled" object?

>> [...] From the primitive and casual
>> books at my disposal I do see that "zuen" and "zuten" mean 'he had
>> him' and 'they had him' resp. I also believe I see that such
>> auxiliaries are combined with a particularly short form of the
>> participles, referred to by Schuchardt as the root of the
>> participle;

> [LT:]
> It is simply the perfective participle of the verb.  Most participles in
> Basque carry an overt suffix proclaiming them as such, but <jo> happens
> to be one of the exceptions: it has no participial suffix, though I
> suspect that it once did, and that the suffix has been lost by a
> combination of phonological change and analogical readjustment.

> [JER:]
>> and "jo" is 'stick; beat' in its shortest form, says my little
>> dictionary;

> [LT:]
> Actually, `hit', `strike', `beat' -- not `stick', which is a noun.

[JER:] In fact, I meant a different mistake, viz. the verb 'to stick,
adhere': I trusted the Spanish dictionary gloss "pegar" to express that
the Basque verb was as semantically broad as the Spanish which, looking in
the Sp.-B. part, I now see it isn't. Let's forget that.

>> and "mutil-a" is 'boy' with the article "-a", but without case or
>> number marking.

> [LT:]
> Not quite.  The form <mutila> is marked as absolutive by its zero
> suffix, and as singular by its singular article <-a>.  The plural
> article is <-ak>, and `the boys' is <mutilak>, in the absolutive.

[JER:] That's what I meant.

>> Therefore my persistent question: Why can't "mutila jo zuen" and
>> "mutila jo zuten" reflect a construction that was earlier meant to
>> express 'the boy, he had him hit', 'the boy, they had him hit'?

> [LT:]
> Well, I can't rule that out, but I can't see any evidence to support it.
> Note in particular that <mutila> exhibits *no* subject properties in
> modern Basque, or in Basque of the historical period.  If it ever was a
> subject, as this proposal requires, the reanalysis must have been
> carried to completion a long time ago.

[JER:] What do you mean mutila has no subject properties - is "the boy" as
the subject of an intransitive verb not precisely mutila? I'm not afraid
of "a long time ago"; I guess it's what we're trying to reach in diachrony
all the time.

[LT:]
> Note also that intransitive verbs are likewise conjugated
> periphrastically but with the intransitive auxiliary <izan> `be'.

> [JER:]
>> Schuchardt also gives "zen" to mean 'he was', so that if you gloss
>> "mutila jo zen" as 'the boy was hit', it seems there is quite a bit
>> of agreement that the verbal root is a participle by itself.

> [LT:]
> The lexical verb stands in the form of its perfective participle in all
> periphrastic past-tense forms, and also in all periphrastic perfects.
> The perfect form corresponding to <Mutila jo zuen> is <Mutila jo du>,
> which differs only in that the auxiliary is now present-tense.  This
> form translates both English `He has hit him' and English `He hit him'
> (earlier today) -- much as in European Spanish.

[JER:] This would fall into place if "have" itself contains "be": Is there
any possibility that the constructions "mutila jo zen" and "mutila jo du"
were originally designed to mean 'the-boy - beaten - he was' = 'the boy
was beaten', and 'the-boy - beaten - for/of-him-he-is' = 'the-boy beaten
he-has-him' = 'he has beaten the boy'/'he beat the boy'? Is there any
solid knowledge excluding such a prehistory?

>> I do not see in what way this makes the *diachronic* interpretation
>> of "mutila jo zuen" any different from the Hindi preterites that are
>> based on Sanskrit constructions of the type "A-Nominative +
>> B-Genitive + PPP/nom." meaning earlier "A was (verb)-ed by B", but
>> now simply "B (verb)-ed A." Where am I wrong?

> [LT:]
> Well, in the Indic case, we have several thousand years of texts to
> consult, so that we can get an idea how the ergative construction arose.
> With Basque, we are not so lucky.

[JER:] But the elements mean the same, one by one, and the semantic sum
total is the same, right? Does that not count for anything?

[LT:]
> Note also that, in Hindi, as in Indic generally (I think), the ergative
> occurs only in the past tense, as is common with ergatives that have
> arisen from perfective or passive constructions.  In Basque, however,
> the ergative construction is used in all circumstances, without
> exception.

[JER:] Looks like a very small difference to me. Can't languages stop at
different points in a process of generalizing a favoured structure? Who
knows that Post-Modern Indic won't introduce the ergative model in the
present tense some day?
   First and last, is translation of the "auxiliary 'have'" demanded by
the language itself? And even if it is, can "be" be contained in it?

Jens