Yiddish

[Charles Mills]

Some comments on Loren's observations below.

"Loren A. Billings" wrote:

> Toman (1996) has discussed how, in the colloquial
> registers, it is possible to drop topic nominals
> and still keep the verb and clitic (cluster) in
> second position in German and Czech (respectively):
>
> German: (das) kenne     ich
>          that know.1Sg  I.Nom
>         'I know it.'
>
>         (das) muss     man wissen
>          that must.3Sg one know.Infin
>         'One must know it.'
>
> Czech:  (to) bych      netvrdil
>          it  would.1Sg know.1Sg
>         'I wouldn't claim it.'
>
>         (to) se        uvid'i
>          it  Reflexive will-see.3Sg
>         'One will see.'
>
> The point is that the initial nominal can be dropped
> and the verb/clitic is phonetically initial in
> the utterance. This, as well as the strictly phrasal
> interpretation of second-position (i.e., with the
> clitic cluster following a first constituent that is
> unambiguously a syntactic phrase) in Czech shows
> that this topic-dropping is syntactic. [...] (my elipsis, CHM)  This
> strongly suggests some sort of borrowing from
> German to Czech [...].

The picture is more complicated, which could have implications for the
proposed interpretation.  Toman (1996) describes examples in which the
pre-clitic expression is fairly recoverable, as in the examples cited
above.  Because the pre-clitic expression is recoverable, Toman views this
as a case of elision, which seems reasonable.  But there are other instances
of sentence-initial Czech clitics for which the elision-account breaks
down.  If this is true, the parallel between Czech and German would be less
clear, unless German behaves the same (I don't know German well enough to
know if that's the case).

One problem with the elision-account is that the elided expression may be
unrecoverable, in which case we have no idea what it was.  If we can't
reconstruct what it was that was elided, then elision becomes more of a
convenient explanation than a well-motivated fact.  Lenertova (2001: 2)
gives the following example:

(i)  Se    mi  vcera         narodil  kluk,  tak  jsme         trochu
oslavili!
     refl. me  yesterday  born      boy,   so   aux.-1pl.  little
celebrated
     "I had a boy yesterday, so we celebrated a little"

In this example, the clitics se and me unexpectedly stand at the front of
the sentence.  What pre-clitic expression has been elided?  No obvious
candidate comes to mind.

In other cases, it seems as if no pre-clitic expression ever existed in the
first place.  The Prirucni Mluvnice Cestiny (1997: 648) gives the sentence
in (iia) in which two clitics also stand at the front of the sentence.  Is
there any evidence that this is anything more than a "scrambled" variation
of the virtually synonymous (iib)?

(ii)  a.  Se  mi  zda,  ze  si  koledujes.
           refl.  me  seems  that  refl.  asking-for-it-2sg.
           "Seems to me that you're asking for trouble"

      b.  Zda se mi, ze si koledujes.

Since the clause [ ze si koledujes ] is the grammatical subject of both
sentences, it is not clear that any extra expressions need to be posited,
unless the two sentences really meant something different.  (Native
speakers?!  Help!  This is your cue to jump in!)  Of course, another
possibility is that both Czech and German strategies follow from
independently motivated principles open to any language (i.e., from "UG").
Or maybe German is a reflex of Slavic?  :-)

Sincerely,
Charles Mills, Knox

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