Continuing the morphology and syntax discussion

Fri Nov 2 13:33:49 UTC 2012

This "grammatical liberty" regarding animate/inanimate nouns is 
extremely interesting. I wonder how far it can be taken.

Michael McCafferty

Quoting "Danielle E. Cyr" <dcyr at YORKU.CA>:

> Hi Bernie,
>
> Wela'lin ugjit this beautiful example of the fluidity of Mi'kmaw and the
> speaker's freedom to customize it accordingly to his/her own perceptions.
>
> This "grammatical liberty" is something that non Aboriginal linguists
> often have
> difficulty to cope with.
>
> Danielle Cyr
>
>
> Quoting Bernie Francis <plnal at HOTMAIL.COM>:
>
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>> I wasn't planning on jumping into this but I'll throw out a couple of things
>> to you re animacy/inanimacy at least in Mi'kmaw.
>>
>> The tree fell on the house is easily translated in Mi'kmaw as "Kmu'j
>> eloqtesink+p wen'ji'kuomk."
>>
>> kmu'j = tree
>>
>> el = directional (that way)
>>
>> -oq = long shaped
>>
>> -tes = sudden/jerky movement
>>
>> -i = stative
>>
>> -k = animate
>>
>> -+p = past (plus sign represents schwa)
>>
>> wen'ji- = french
>>
>> -kuom = dwelling
>>
>> -k = locative
>>
>> The car ran into a tree. "Wutepaqn na't wen me'teskuapnn kmu'jl." ('ran' of
>> course is out of character here. One would use 'to hit' or 'to bump into'
>> since cars can't run) Therefore "Someone's car hit/bumped into a tree."
>>
>> W = 3rd per. possessive
>>
>> -utepaqn = car inan.
>>
>> na't wen = someone
>>
>> me'tesk = bump into
>>
>> -uap = past
>>
>> n = an.
>>
>> n = obv.  ('l' in Restigouche dialect)
>>
>> kmu'j = tree an.
>>
>> l = obv. an.
>>
>> At least in Mi'kmaw Richard, there's nothing ungrammatical about the 2nd
>> sentence.
>>
>> Sometime, animacy/inanimacy is determined by distance, i.e., a bus on my
>> reserve is inanimate because (I believe) it's walking distance to town. In
>> Eskasoni a reserve which is 30 miles from Sydney, N.S., it is animate. Yet,
>> my theory falls down when I realize that a motorcycle is inanimate on my
>> reserve but animate in Eskasoni.
>>
>> A fridge is always animate probably because it's very important in the
>> household whereas a TV is inanimate (or so I thought). I discovered later
>> that only the box around the TV is inanimate whereas the picture tube is
>> animate. The new flat screen TV has grammatically taken on the
>> inanimacy like
>> the older sets.
>>
>> Inanimate objects in Mi'kmaw can easily become animate. It is we Mi'kmaq who
>> may imbue that object with a spirit causing it to become animate. We can do
>> this by recreating it in some way.
>>
>> I don't know if I helped or made things even more complicated. In
>> any event I
>> decided to send it along for your perusal.
>>
>> Good luck Richard.
>>
>> berni francis
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On 2012-11-01, at 8:04 PM, "Richard RHODES" <rrhodes at BERKELEY.EDU> wrote:
>>
>> > Charles (and everyone listening in),
>> >
>> >     I think the hardcore linguists are concerned about just how much this
>> discussion will be "inside baseball".
>> >
>> >     To whit, Julie presented a wonderful paper on the relevance of
>> sentience in the formation of Innu intransitive verbs.
>> >
>> >     The general background is this: everyone knows that the class of
>> "natural" animates are those things that are or appear to be capable of
>> moving under their own power. Hence, cars, trains, and big boats. (These are
>> opposed to words that are purely grammatical animates, like trees and
>> blackberries, tobacco and pipes, and the like.) For some time, people have
>> been observing that there are syntactic restrictions on grammatical animates
>> that are not "natural" animates. So many languages have restrictions on
>> straightforward translations of clauses like:
>> >
>> > The tree fell on the house.
>> >
>> > Words that are not "natural" animates are banned (or at least greatly
>> dispreferred) as the subjects of TI's. (If any of the native speakers out
>> there find such clauses OK in their language, I'd sure like to know.)
>> >
>> > Trickier are sentences like:
>> >
>> > The car ran into the tree.
>> >
>> > Most of my consultants in Ottawa find such sentences completely
>> ungrammatical, or at the least very weird. But no one has worked much on the
>> problem.
>> >
>> > So that brings us to Julie's paper. She argued from features of II verb
>> derivation that there is a three distinction in animacy. She called the most
>> animate entities sentient. Those that are capable of some kinds of
>> self-action, but not of awareness (my terms, not hers) teleological. (The
>> view is more nuanced, but this will do for now.) And all the rest are
>> inanimate. At that point, some of us would have said she had a paper and
>> could have walked away.
>> >
>> > But, of course, she didn't. Julie wants to do more. So she spent a good
>> deal of her paper talking about the mechanics of placing the
>> relevant part of
>> verb structure in a particular place in the pre-fab structure
>> dictated by the
>> approach to syntax she ascribes to.
>> >
>> > Phil Lesourd and I asked whether seeking a structural solution was the
>> right way to go.
>> >
>> > My question was based on the English example which was provably semantic,
>> not structural. Phil's question was more general.
>> >
>> > But the whole discussion got bogged down. Julie seemed to be saying that
>> there's great value in UG -- which neither Phil nor I believe -- and that's
>> as far as it got.
>> >
>> > More later,
>> >
>> > Rich
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:25:28 -0400, Charles Bishop wrote:
>> >
>> > Hi Richard,
>> > Sorry that I couldn't be at this year's AC.   What was Julie's point?
>> > Charles
>> >
>> > On Oct 30, 2012, at 4:07 PM, Richard RHODES wrote:
>> >
>> > Folks,
>> >
>> > I'm just putting out a feeler to see if there is interest in
>> continuing the
>> syntax morphology discussion online.
>> >
>> > It seemed like Julie Brittain's paper on Sunday morning put us
>> right in the
>> middle of it again, but half of the folks were already gone by then.
>> >
>> > Let me know if it's worth talking in this venue.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Rich Rhodes
>> >
>> > Richard A. Rhodes
>> > Department of Linguistics
>> > 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650
>> > University of California
>> > Berkeley, 94720
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> "The only hope we have as human beings is to learn each other's
> languages.  Only
> then can we truly hope to understand one another."
>
> Professor Danielle E. Cyr
> Department of French Studies
> York University
> Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3
> Tel. 1.416.736.2100 #310180
> FAX. 1.416.736.5924
> dcyr at yorku.ca
>