accusative and ergative languages

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

>Pat responds:

>1) English is *not* monosyllabic;

>2) The variation i-a-u is *not* an internal inflection but rather a
>phonological response to now missing former inflections;

????? Good heavens ! The variation i-a-u *is* an internal inflection,
synchronically and diachronically, and just nothing else. What are you
talking about ?

>3) No monosyllabic language could "afford" to assign inflectional meanings
>to vowels in CVC syllables because the number of available monosyllables
>would be unreasonably and impractically reduced.

>4) If you still maintain that internal inflection happens in monosyllabic
>languages, an example from a monosyllabic language might be more convincing.

I'm not sure what you mean by monosyllabic language. If this is a language
where every *word*  may consist of one and only one syllable, morphology
sebsu stricto being absent from the language, your constraint does seem to
make some sense; such languages, where no syllable may be regarded as
functional (as opposed to autosemantic) are, however, quite rare and I'm
not sure that they exist at all; if, however, monosyllabic means that every
*morpheme*, lexical or grammatical, will consist of one syllable and one
only (and, vice versa, every syllable will have some autonomous meaning or
function), a phenomenon which does occur quite frequently, Classical
Tibetan may come close; and Classical Tibetan does have ablaut.

>Pat wrote:

>>> I prefer (though, of course, you and many others may not) to
>>> distinguish the terms: "isolating", referring to a language for
>>> which we can reconstuct no flectional or agglutinating stage; and
>>> "analytic", for a language we can.

>Larry responded:

>> Bizarre.  What is the point of trying to classify languages on the basis
>> of what we can reconstruct for their ancestors?

>Pat writes:

>Singularly odd! Does historical linguistics really have a point? Hmmm!

Standard morphological (technique-) typology is strictly synchronic, and
this is the way this terminology is generally used. It is not unthinkable,
and possibly even useful in some respects, to introduce a new terminology
here which does reflect what may be known about the diachrony of a given
language. So, speaking of "isolating (but former agglutinative)" lgs., or
"flectional (but formerly isolating) ones" may be useful in the context of
diachronic typology. However, this is not the general use of these terms
and if we want to reflect diachronic knowledge in out typological
terminology we should devise new and unambiguous terms. Using the old
labels with new contents is misleading and confusing, and there is already
enough confusion in linguistic terminology.

>>> whereas in Language B: noun(B)+acc. verb is *ungrammatical*.

>Larry responded:

>> I take it you've never come across Spanish, Italian, Russian or Latin.

>> Spanish: <Ha visto la pelicula> `S/he has seen the film.'
>> Latin: <Caesarem vidit> `S/he saw Caesar.'

>> Accusative noun, verb, no overt subject, perfectly normal.

>Pat rejoinds:

>I do not see a 'funny face' so, temporarily, I will assume that you are
>serious about these remarks.

>"Overt" means 'open and observable', and the overt subject of the Spanish
>phrase is "he/she" indicated by -0 on [ha]; of the Latin phrase, 'he/she'
>indicated by -(i)t. I would think you might have understood that I was
>referring to languages which do not code the subject with affixes on the
>verb.

No, it was not clear that you were referring to this kind of languages.
Let's have a look at one of those, though:

KhalkhaMongolian (no subject affixes on the verb):

Nom chamd yavuulav.

 (He, she, it, someone, nobody, I, we, you and whatnot) -"book (indefinite
acc.)", "to-you", "sent". (Someone) sent you the book. "Someone" is not the
translation, but the dummy for every agent you wish and which can be made
clear by the context; it is overtly expressed by nuffin'. The
extra-syntactic context, that is. A perfectly normal sentence in context.
It is true that Khalkha does use the personal pronouns in examples like
this to disambiguate, but it doesn't have to. The construction is certainly
not ungrammatical.

Stefan

Stefan Georg
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