Personal Pronouns / Ergativity

Carol F. Justus cjustus at mail.utexas.edu
Thu Jun 17 17:13:27 UTC 1999


>[ moderator re-formatted ]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Carol F. Justus <cjustus at mail.utexas.edu>
>Date: Tuesday, June 15, 1999 3:47 AM

>[snip]

>>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?).

>[Ed Selleslagh]

>It seems to me - a non-specialist - that two Castilian constructions might
>be related to this.

Dear Ed,

I will intercalate some comments to interesting questions that you raise:

>1. the expression 'estáte quieto' (keep, stay, remain...quiet), remarkable
>because 'estar' is already stative and clearly intransitive and not
>susceptible to becoming reflexive; so I presume it is to be interpreted as
>medio-passive.  But what mental process and/or grammatical 'reasoning' is
>behind it?

The meaning here is expressed in Hittite, and other older IE languages by
uses of non-cognate verbs 'have' (Puhvel's Hittite Etym. Dict. gives
examples under har(k)-, an active -mi conjugation verb with no
medio-passive counterparts)! The question as to what the universal process
or linguistic category  is deserves careful consideration in the context of
the larger system of Castilian and what sort of system it is replacing,
among other things.

For what it may be worth old middles, Ancient Greek kei‰tai and Sanskrit
såete 'lies, is in a lying position', lack the apparent volitionality that
seems to be added with the new Hittite  medio-passive in -ri and the
particle -za. Spanish estar, I believe, is etymologically related to PIE
*staµ- (*steH-) 'stand' which, in an Ancient Greek active root aorist had
an intransitive meaning (stand, take a standing position: eå-steµ), but a
transitive meaning with sigmatic aorist forms (eå-steµ-sa). I have no
solution to this nor to what PIE *es- was supplemented in Spanish. My
present hypothesis would wonder if it didn't have something to do with a
general drift in overall structure that was taking place.

Your data makes me wonder is whether there is a category that is simply
being renewed with a different form or whether the form differs because the
category has taken on a unique nuance to fit its niche in Castilian.

>2. the formally reflexive use of transitive verbs in Castilian that has exact
>parallels in (modern) Greek medio-passive: 'se prohibe (in older Spanish:
>prohibese) la entrada' (Greek: apagoréyetai he: éisodos (pron.
>/apagorévete i ísodhos/) or 'vendese esta casa' or 'enjuáguese el
>envase'.  You also have the parallel 'encontrar / encontrarse' - 'brísko:
>(/vrísko/) / brískomai (/vrískome/)' .

>Any comments?

>Ed.

Yes there is a similarity in meaning here with the medio-passive. In fact
one of the classic definitions of the old medio-passive is 'reflexive',
probably to the extent that the action involves the subject.

But the fact that the Romance language reflexives are formally separate
from the passives of those languages makes me hesitant to identify them as
one with the old category, which could also have a passivemeaning. In
Modern Greek, is there also a new separate passive? Already in Ancient
Greek with some verbs in some tenses there was a new strictly passive
suffix (-the:-) that often had passive meaning (The problem with the old
categories was that a form might vary in function depending on the verb in
question or the form of the verb. Smyth's Greek Grammar catalogs this
without really offering the kinds of principled generalizations that we
would now like. These issues deserve more study language-specific study in
the context of the attempt to do what you suggest, give some general
defintion. And the studies that we have deserve to be applied to the kinds
of comparative contexts that you bring up.

Thanks for the data.

Carol



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