Volitional patients

[Irine Melikishvili]

Georgian and other kartvelian languages take the
human/inhuman character of affected actantes strongly
into account. All human directly affected actantes
take dative in the complative aspect formes of the
verbs: moepera mas(D)"flattered him", miuloca mas(D)
"congratulated him", gahqva mas(D)"followed him",
shexvda mas(D)"met him", akoca mas(D) "kissed him",
daartqa mas(D) "hit him", ukbina mas(D) "bit him"
uchkmita mas(D) "kniff ihn" etc. This can be regarded,
I think, as the semantic marking of arguments in
opposition to syntactic marking. Old IE languages seem
to have more from this kind of marking and in modern
languages the accusative marking of human patient must
be the result of the unification of prototypical
patient marking. I think the typologycal investigation
of dative/accusative marking of human directly
affected arguments should be interesting and the grade
of subject dative  marking of affective verbs may be
expected to be in correlation with it. Both seem to me
the aspects of semantic marking of actantes.
Irine Melikishvili
Director of the Institute of General, Comparative and
Applied Lingiustics of Tbilisi State University


--- Paul Hopper <hopper at CMU.EDU> wrote:

> On Aashild's query about volitional patients: Some
> German verbs also take the dative when the human
> object is in some way complicit in the action.
> Examples would be schmeicheln "flatter", gratulieren
> "congratulate", folgen "follow", begegnen "meet".
> But unlike Aashild's Icelandic example, the
> accusative is never an alternative.
> 
> Goethe notoriously wrote "Wer ruft mir?" "Who calls
> me?" (Faust I,1). "Mich" (acc.) in place of "mir"
> (dat.) would be correct here, and Goethe is
> routinely accused of committing a solecism, but
> perhaps there is a subtle intention--the object
> being a spirit (Erdgeist) waiting to be summoned.
> 
> Paul
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > Dear colleagues,
> > 
> > I'm wondering if anyone has information on
> languages where a patient 
> > arugment which is somehow volitionally involved in
> the event which affects
> > it (e.g. 'letting' something happen to it) is
> marked differently from a
> > regular nonvolitional patient. There are examples
> of this from Icelandic
> > (examples from Barddal 2001):
> > 
> > 1. Hann klóraDi mig        2. Hann klóraDi mér
> he.NOM scratched me.ACC
> > he.NOM scratched me.DAT
> > 
> > (D here used for the voiced dental approximant)
> Both of these translate
> > into English as 'he scratched me'; the difference
> is that in 1) the
> > scratching is an act of violence, where as in 2)
> it refers to scratching
> > in order to relieve an itch; in other words, the
> dative-marked participant
> > in 2) voluntarily submits to the scratching,
> whereas the accusative-marked
> > participant in 1) is a hapless victim.
> > 
> > Does anyone know of other languages that show
> similar patterns? The 
> > distinction wouldn't necessarily have to be in the
> case-marking of the 
> > object, any formal distinction on this basis is of
> interest.
> > 
> > Thanks in advance,
> > 
> > Åshild Næss -- Åshild Næss Postdoctoral researcher
> Dept. of Linguistics and
> > Scandinavian Studies University of Oslo P.O. Box
> 1102 Blindern 0317 Oslo,
> > Norway
> > 
> > Phone: (+47) 22 84 40 06
> > 
> > Office: HW327
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Paul J. Hopper
> Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the
> Humanities
> Department of English
> College of Humanities and Social Sciences
> Carnegie Mellon University
> Pittsburgh, PA 15232, USA
> Tel. 412-683-1109
> Fax 412-268-7989
> 


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