Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

[Carol F. Justus]

Dear Jens and Wolfgang,

The issues of diathesis, ergativity, and reflexive pronouns under
discussion here are indeed complex and in need of clarification. I comment
on one really.

For example:

Quote from Schulze:

>[...] Diathesis as a referential strategy (phrase internal as well as
>> discourse dependent) presupposes a reference-dominated type. Many Modern
>> IE languages are of this type [...], but PIE itself
>> obviously lacked this strategy which comes clear from the fact that we
>> cannot reconstruct a common "passive" for PIE. Diathesis is a very
>> active feature in language change. It can come and go, and nothing
>> allows us to propose a Passive for PIE just because a number of (modern)
>> IE languages share this feature.

Jens' response:

>I strongly disagree witht he statement that PIE had no passive. In fact it
>had several. One of the basic functions of the middle voice was patently
>to express the passive use of transitive verbs.

Let's stop here for a moment.

To declare that PIE did or did not have a passive presupposes a clear
definition of a passive and of a middle. Medio-passive is the compromise
term, I believe.

Keenan (1976 in Timothy Shopen's Language Typology and Syntactic Change:
Clause Structure) defined it very clearly as a foregrounding and
backgrounding device operating on the arguments of transitive VP's.

In 1991 Klaiman (Grammatical Voice? Oxford UP?) then typologically
distinguished between the role of a passive as derived voice in
nominative-accusative languages and the role of the middle in active
languages which have 'basic voice', not 'derived voice'. The role of a
middle in active langauges was to move members of one verb class into the
other of two verb classes, as active languages typically have two distinct
verb classes: verbs such as 'sing, run, dance' (active) and 'lie, sit,
stand' (stative). Such verbs are essentially intransitive. Devices also
created transitive verbs. Those of you who know more about active languages
may have more to say about the role of voice in those languages. I am
citing here only the bare bones of Klaiman's analysis, and it really
doesn't matter whether you say 'active' or 'split-ergative', if the
properties are the same.

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have suggested that PIE was active in type, citing
the two verb classes in Hittite, the -mi and -hi conjugations, among other
things. If active in type refers to having primarily intransitive verbs and
derivational strategies to make them transitive, then PIE had no passive.
It takes a transitive verb to be passivized. Along with primarily
intransitive verbs and the lack of a passive, PIE had no transitive verb of
possession, no 'have'. 'Have' entered dialectally by different paths. There
are now two recent statements on the path of 'have' into attested IE
languages, one in the second volume of the recently published Lehmann Fs.
(Journal of IE Studies Monograph 31) and another in the Proceedings of the
Xth UCLA IE Conference (JIES Monograph 32).

Jens continued:

>It goes so far that
>causatives in the middle voice lose their causative meaning: Skt.
>pa:ta'yate 'is made fly, flies'; also, while nasal presents from
>adjectives are factitive in Hittite (tepu- -> tepnuzzi 'makes small'),
>they are ingressive in Balto-Slavic and Germanic (ON rodhna 'turn red')
>which must reflect the function of the corresponding middle-voice
>inflection.

Sanskrit pa:t- is the root. The suffix -aya- has made it causative, then
the middle made it intransitive (with the same meaning as the root?). The
middle could passivize it precisely because it first became transitive via
the -aya- causative suffix. But an intransitive root *pa:t- could not be
passivized.

Hittite tepunzzi is transtive active by a similar process, but it does not
undergo medio-passive passivization. I know of no *tepnutari. In playing
around with such comparisons in fact I noticed that the *OR- root in
Hittite does interesting things that differ from those in Greek. In Hittite
ari 'arrives, reaches' is a -hi conjugation verb and contrasts with
arta(ri) 'stands' (deponent middle), while the -mi version is a derived
causative arnuzzi 'brings'. Formally comparable is Homeric Greek middle
õ:rto 'sets off, starts up', transitive active órnumi 'arouse, urge',
middle órnumai 'arise, start up'. One would expect a comparable Hittite
*arnutari 'be brought', but it seems not to occur. What Hittite does have
are pairs of suppletive active-passives. The Latin cognate oritur 'arises'
is deponent. Although Latin does have some active-middle pairs comparable
to those of Hittite, Greek, and Sanskrit (e.g. pascit 'nourishes', pascitur
'grazes, is nourished') beside its deponents, it otherwise has a productive
passive voice. Latin derivational devices (e.g. -a:- first conjugation:
novus 'new', nova:re 'renew') have created a lot of new transitive verbs.

Coming back then to Jens:

> Alongside this, there was the "stative" morpheme //-eH1-//;
>this was stative with intransitive verbs, as aorist *sed-eH1- 'enter a
>sitting position', prs. *sed-H1-ye'- 'be in a sitting position, sit',

This stative was not productive in PIE (see the issue of 'have' in the
Lehmann Fs.). The root 'sit' in fact is most interesting here. Hittite
'sit' is derived as middle of 'be': eszi 'is', esa(ri) 'sits'. With -za
(often called a reflexive particle) in New Hittite then the combination -za
esari means 'take a seat, sit down' (with sakki 'knows', -za sakki means
'acknowledges'). With the root *es- there was no need of a "stative"
suffix, nor was there with middles, Greek he:stai, Sanskrit a:ste 'sits'.
But the 'active' root *sed- 'sit' was another matter. In Latin the stative
is very productive in its second conjugation -e:- verbs (habe:re 'have',
sede:re 'sit' etc.). But its use there is part of a different verbal
system, one in which there is a productive passive voice. These -e:-
statives are often syntactically transitive but semantically stative, e.g.
'have': librum habet (see Bauer in HS?).

This is not to deny that even Hittite had passive uses of medio-passives.
The point is to look at what is productive in the system. Every language
can do pretty much what any other can, but some languages do some things
more naturally than others. By the time Greek and Sanskrit were
productively operating with a medio-passive, it was already a bit removed
from the medio-passive of Hittite. While Greek had retained quite a few
athematic verbs beside the more productive thematic type, Sanskrit really
didn't contrast a thematic and athematic type. And Latin had only one verb
type, thematic in the present. Hittite still had two verb classes, its -mi
and -hi types.

Coming back then to Jens' causative suffixes in Sanskrit (-aya-) and
Hittite (-nu-), I would suggest that they were two independent innovations
after the breakup. They were transitivizing devices for these new
nominative-accusative languages that were experimenting with a passive. The
fact that -nu- occurs in both Hittite and Greek need not push it back to
PIE. Achaeans and the Ahhiyawa were probably at least as well acquainted in
post-PIE times as the Hittite treaties suggest Hittites were with the
Ahhiyawa. There had to have been massively re-contacts early after the
breakup. But linguistic systems probably kept change from moving too
quickly, despite a lot of individual innovations.

This is not meant as a statement about what changes can or do take place.
This is part of a larger attempt to arrive a plausible solution to what did
take place in one well-attested language family.

Carol Justus