[Lingtyp] Is there 'Raising' triggered by pseudo noun incorporation?

[Randy J. LaPolla]

Dear Lesha,
Martin and David’s posts open things up a bit, and made me think of another approach to a phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese:

I have argued that Mandarin has pragmatically determined word order, i.e. the word order is determined simply by what is topic and what is not, with non-topical elements occurring after the verb, and the speaker has choices in terms of what appears as topical or not (there may be three or possibly more topics in a single clause), e.g.

1. Wǒ (de) dùzi è le. [1sg (ASSOC) belly hungry ASP] ‘I am/was hungry’, lit ‘My belly is/was hungry’, where [1sg (ASSOC) belly] is a single topic.

2. (similar to David’s example, with two topics): Wǒ dùzi è le. [1sg belly hungry ASP] ‘I am/was hungry’, lit. ‘I belly hungry’, where ‘belly’ is not a subject, but a secondary topic in a [Topic-[Topic-comment]Comment] structure. I do not consider this “possessor ascension” (though talked about it like that in a 1995 paper, I think), just a choice of what is made the primary topic, in this case the possessor of the belly.

3. (where ‘belly’ is also separated from the possessor, but not made a secondary topic, but made part of the focus) Wǒ è le dùzi. [1sg hungry ASP belly] ‘I was hungry’, lit, ‘I hungry belly’.

I have discussed this as purely a difference in choice of information structure pattern, determined in some cases by the desire to keep the same topic throughout a stretch of discourse, but in the last type, by choosing to put what might be a topic instead in the focus, the resulting phrase is then seen as an event rather than a topic-comment structure (see the natural example given on p. 278 of LaPolla & Poa 2006: Wáng Miǎn . . . sǐ le fùqin [Wang Mian . .. die ASP father] ‘Wang Mian’s father died’, but with Wang Mian as topic and the father in the focus, making it something like ‘Wang Mian experienced the dying of his father’). This type is also used more generally for events, even in non-possessor situations, e.g. for meteorological events, xià yǔ le [fall rain ASP] ‘It is/was raining’, and many common everyday events, e.g. Lai che le. [come car ASP] ‘A car is coming’ (contrasting with Che lai le [car come ASP] ‘The car is here’).

If you are still with me, the reason I mention all of this is that the putting of what otherwise might be a topic into the focus might be seen as a type of pragmatic or even structural incorporation, much like I argued for the pragmatic incorporation of instruments in some verb phrases in LaPolla 1995, e.g. qiāng-bì [gun-kill] ‘kill with a gun/shoot to death’.

LaPolla, Randy J. 1995. Pragmatic relations and word order in Chinese. In Pamela Downing & Michael Noonan (eds.), Word order in discourse, 297-329. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins Pub. Co. (A Chinese translation of this paper by Zhan Weidong of Peking University was published in Yuyanxue Luncong 30 (Papers in Linguistics 30), pp. 334-368. Beijing: Shangwu Yinshu Guan, 2004).
www.randylapolla.net/Papers/LaPolla_1995_Pragmatic_Relations_and_Word_Order_in_Chinese.pdf <http://www.randylapolla.net/Papers/LaPolla_1995_Pragmatic_Relations_and_Word_Order_in_Chinese.pdf> 

LaPolla, Randy J. & Dory Poa. 2006. On describing word order. Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing, ed. by Felix Ameka, Alan Dench, & Nicholas Evans, 269-295. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
www.randylapolla.net/Papers/LaPolla_and_Poa_2006_On_Describing_Word_Order.pdf <http://www.randylapolla.net/Papers/LaPolla_and_Poa_2006_On_Describing_Word_Order.pdf>   

Hope this helps.

Randy
-----
Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）
Professor of Linguistics and Chinese, School of Humanities 
Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive | Singapore 637332
http://randylapolla.net/
Most recent book:
https://www.routledge.com/The-Sino-Tibetan-Languages-2nd-Edition/LaPolla-Thurgood/p/book/9781138783324



> On 4 Feb 2018, at 6:30 PM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> Martin's latest message is helpful in clarifying the question.  And if I may add my two cents worth ...
> 
> On 04/02/2018 19:06, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
>>  I head-ache.
>> 
>> You feet-washed me.
>> 
>> Father knife-sharpened the neighbor. (Alexey (“Lesha”) Vinyar’s Chukchi example)
>> 
>> Now Alexey Vinyar’s question is whether one gets this sort of pattern also with pseudo-incorporation (PNI), where the possessed noun is still strictly adjacent, but a complete noun phrase can occur in this position (not just a noun stem). So this would be something like
>> 
>> You [@dirty feet]-washed me.
>> 
>> Father sharpened-[@dull knife] the neighbor.
>> 
>> I don’t know of any cases, but I’m not sure whether PNI is a particularly useful notion to begin with. As seen nicely in Borik & Gehrke’s (2015) book, there are a wide range of related constructions with some family resemblances but apparently little overall coherence.
>> 
> Well in colloquial Malay/Indonesian, you can easily get structures such as
> 
> Aku jari kelingking sebelah kiri sakit
> I [ [ finger pinky side left ] ache ]
> 
> and such structures are very common in western Indonesia and Mainland Southeast Asia.  The typical way of looking at them is as instances of
> 
> TOPIC [ SUBJECT PREDICATE ]
> 
> where the relationship of possession is just one possible outcome of a broader topic/comment relationship.  Of course, in the cases that I am most familiar with, at least, there's no evidence that the SUBJECT (be it simple or complex) cliticizes to the predicate.  But Martin, at least, would surely share my reluctance to define a construction type based on as elusive a property as wordhood.
> 
> I suspect, however, that constructions such as the above are not exactly what Alexey is looking for, which may be considered as reinforcing Borik and Gehrke's point cited above by Martin. 
> 
> David
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Gil
> 
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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> 
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