Continuing the morphology and syntax discussion

Fri Nov 2 13:35:47 UTC 2012

Firstly, HELLO DANIELLE!!! Long time no hear. Thanks for your comment Danielle yet as I stated, I don't know if it will help in the discussion. Yet, I'm happy in knowing that YOU got it.

I guess we all have much to learn.

Thanks again my friend and all the best to you.

ber

Sent from my iPad

On 2012-11-02, at 10:26 AM, "Danielle E. Cyr" <dcyr at YORKU.CA> wrote:

> 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