How do you say "it" in Jargon?

[Dave Robertson]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 15:14:21 -1000, James Crippen <jcrippen at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>It doesn't
>matter whether an agent or patient is animate in CJ. 

In the pidgin variety of CJ I'm working on (written by Native people of
southern interior BC around 1900), there are definitely restrictions on
inanimate *pronoun* agents.  That is, "yaka" means "he, she" but not "it". 
Also on inanimate *pronoun* patients; "yaka" means "him, her" but not "it".  

>
>In CJ the agent is the same as the grammatical subject, and the
>patient is the same as the direct object. 

In this regard, there's a small amount of weird stuff going on in the CJ
variety I study.  Probably not enough to negate your claim, though.

>I don't know if there's a
>passive form in CJ

I haven't found one in the 'Interior' variety.  There's just a frequent use
of a subject "klaska" ("they") with an interpretation similar to the
passive.  A made-up example might be "Klaska mamuk kort-haws yaka",
literally "they make courthouse him", for "He was sentenced."  

>The following would be ungrammatical (indicated with
>a star *):
>
>*Náika míməlust latáp
>I die table
>
>This is ungrammatical because an intransitive verb like "míməlust"
>can't take a direct object, it only takes a subject.

Two brief points: (1) "mimelust" could, for some speakers of some varieties,
function equally as an intransitive "to die" and a transitive "to kill".  So
the above sentence could be interpreted as "I killed (broke?) the table." 
(2) Many or most varieties of CJ have what we can call null prepositions, as
a less-frequent alternative to "kopa".  So the above sentence could be
perfectly sensible in the interpretation "I'll die/am dying [on] the table."
 A more or less exactly remembered example from 'Interior' CJ would be
"Naika klatwa Kamlups", "I went [to] Kamloops."

>Since CJ is/was often spoken as a pidgin, people would make
>grammatical mistakes all the time. It's quite likely that another CJ
>speaker would understand the previous example even though it's
>ungrammatical, the same way an English speaker would understand the
>English version despite its ungrammaticality. Ungrammaticality does
>not imply incomprehensibility, although both often cooccur.

I like your overall point there, but with the two caveats I just noted.

>Unfortunately there's no really good textbook on descriptive syntax,
>so I can't point you to a decent introductory reference. I learned
>from William O'Grady who uses his own textbook that he promises to
>publish someday, but for now it's only available from him.

You're right, and I can only dream of reading a copy of O'Grady's textbook.
 It'd be a great tool for field linguistists.

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