Genetic Descent

Larry Trask larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Tue Jun 5 14:32:46 UTC 2001


--On Friday, June 1, 2001 12:26 pm -0500 "David L. White"
<dlwhite at texas.net> wrote:

[on Takia]

> If the
> finite verbal morphology (morphemes, not categories) is Takia, it is
> Takia. That may well seem arbitrary, but it is not.  Verbs are more basic
> than nouns, and what is more basic is more indicative of descent.

I'm sorry, but I cannot agree that verbs are more basic than nouns.  This
seems to me an arbitrary fiat.  Anyway, I've never seen a language without
nouns, and that suggests to me that nouns are about as basic as anything
can be in languages.  But I'll discuss this in terms of what follows.

A little quibble first, though.  Arguably, I possess no characteristic more
"basic" than my biological sex, which is male.  Does it therefore follow
that I am more closely related to my father than to my mother? ;-)

> For English, it is easy to demonstrate this by considering the following
> sentence:

>  The tanks crossing the bridge was/were not ideal.

>  With "were", this is a statement (improbable as it may be) about the
>  tanks.  [snip an incomprehensible sentence]

> In the more normal reading, with "was", it is easy to see that the verb
> agrees with "crossing", not with "tanks", and that therefore "crossing"
> is the head of the NP. (Not to mention being a gerund, not a participle.)
> If it is the head of the NP, it is reasonable to suppose that it is also
> in some sense the head of the corresponding sentence "The tanks crossed
> the bridge".

The position that the verb is the head of the sentence is embraced in
certain syntactic theories, especially in most dependency grammars and in
some relational grammars.  But it is rejected in other approaches,
including other relational approaches and all Chomskyan approaches.  The
Chomskyan view takes the head of the sentence to be an abstract element,
and not the verb.  I am not a Chomskyan, but I don't think it can simply be
taken for granted that the verb is the head of the sentence.  This is an
analytical stance, not a piece of truth.

There is also a fascinating counter-argument here.  Consider this example:

  'That Martians are green is well known.'

Now, the subject of 'is' is plainly the complement clause 'That Martians
are green'.  Fine.  Now, what is the head of this clause?  Is it the verb,
as David seems to be implying?  Then the head of the subject is 'are'.  But
-- whoops -- this is plural, and yet the whole clause takes singular
agreement.
Oh, dear. ;-)

> We may also note that things that might be held to apply to
> an entire proposition, like negation, are typically attached to or
> associated with verbs,

It is true that sentence operators, such as negation and tense, are most
typically associated with verbs.  But this is not true without exception.
For example, in Sanskrit -- I am told -- the negative marker can appear
anywhere in a sentence at all, and need not be attached to the verb.  (OK;
I'm ready for flak from the Sanskritists on this list. ;-) )

> and that though there is a type of language,
> polysynthetic, in which the verb and its mandatorily associated elements
> form a complete sentence, there is no corresponding type of language
> where the subject noun and its mandatorily associated elements form a
> complete sentence.

It is true that, in *some* languages, a sentence may consist entirely of an
affixed verb.  But it is equally true that, in *some* languages, a sentence
may consist entirely of nominal elements, with no verb-form present at all.
Both observations are interesting, but why should one be more "central"
than the other?

> Thus upon examination it is not arbitrary to regard
> vebal morphology as more basic than nominal morphology.

Ah, no -- for several reasons.  I've just mentioned two: it is not an
obvious truth that the verb is the head of the sentence, and it is not true
that verbs are universally more indispensable than nominals.  But there is
more, much more.

What David White is arguing, successfully or not, is that the *lexical
verb* plays a central role in sentence structure.  Even if we grant this,
it *does not follow* that verbal morphology is somehow more central than
any other morphology, such as nominal morphology.  Verbal morphology is not
the same thing as a lexical verb.

Moreover, David's arguments here seem self-contradictory.  Consider a
language with native verbal morphology but with many borrowed lexical verbs
-- such as English or Basque.  In such a language, it is the (borrowed)
lexical verb which serves as the sentential head, in David's account, and
which determines the syntactic properties of the sentence.  At the same
time, the native verbal morphology merely follows the requirements of the
lexical verb in a wholly passive manner.  But now consider David's
position: the (borrowed) lexical verb is the most central element in the
sentence, and its properties determine the structure of the sentence,
including the associated morphology.  Yet it is the native verbal
morphology which is somehow (I haven't followed this) more central in
identifying the genetic origin of the language, because this morphology is
now what is "central".
Have I missed something?  This line of thinking seems wholly inconsistent
to me.

Take a real example.  Basque, like English, has a native transitive verb
meaning 'like', as in English 'I like this.'  Spanish has no such verb, and
expresses the same notion with its intransitive dative-subject verb
<gustar> 'be pleasing (to)'.  As it happens, Basque has borrowed the
Spanish verb as <gustatu> 'be pleasing (to)'.  This borrowed verb is taken
over into Basque with wholly Spanish syntax, as a dative-subject verb, even
though dative-subject verbs are virtually nonexistent in Basque.  The
associated verbal morphology is, of course, wholly native Basque, since
Basque has borrowed almost no verbal morphology.  But that verbal
morphology is simply pressed into service to follow the dictates of the
borrowed lexical verb, producing things like <gustatzen zait> 'I like it'
(literally, 'it is pleasing to me'), entirely parallel to Spanish <me
gusta> 'I like it', and wholly at odds with the native construction
<atsegin dut> 'I like it', a simple transitive construction, like its
English equivalent.

It seems that David is telling us that, at one and the same time, the
borrowed lexical verb is paramount, while the native verbal morphology is
also paramount.  And I can't follow this.  Surely it has to be one or the
other, at best.

Finally, let me advance a counter-argument.  As David's own 'tank' example
illustrates, it is commonplace in languages for verbs to agree with nominal
arguments -- that is, for intrinsic features of nominals (person, number,
gender, maybe others) to be copied onto verbs.  But it is virtually unknown
-- perhaps entirely unknown -- for verbal features to be copied onto
nominals.  Is this not a splendid argument that nominals are more
autonomous, more central, more "basic", and that verbs are merely the
slaves of nominals? ;-)

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: (01273)-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
Fax: (01273)-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)



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