[Lingtyp] Verbs of success with dative subject
Anvita Abbi
anvitaabbi at gmail.com
Sun Jan 6 08:30:38 UTC 2019
I think one should not use "Dative subject" as many Indian languages either
use genitive or instrumental marked subject for experiential verbs.
Subjects of 'non-performative' activities generally take an oblique marking
in most of the South Asian languages. Perhaps 'oblique marked subjects'
would better fit the bill. These will cover both experiential and
non-experiential constructions such as 'out of control' which
prototypically take 'oblique marked subject' as in the following Hindi
sentence (1). Constructions where attributes of a person/thing are defined
also has the subject marked by 'oblique' or what has been termed 'dative'
(2, 3) as in Marathi sentences.
(1) *papa se gaɽi chuuʈ gəii*
papa abl/instr train leave (Vi) GO.fem. pst
'Papa missed the train' (out of control) (Hindi)
(2) *tya-la himmət a:he*
3msg-dat courage be
'He has courage'
(Marathi)
(3) * zha:ɖa-la phula a:het*
tree-dat flowers be
' The tree has flowers.' (Marathi)
Anvita
Prof. (Dr.) Anvita Abbi (Padma Shri)
*Adjunct Professor, Department of Linguistics*
*Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada*
*B.B. Borkar Chair of Comparative Literature, Goa University*
*Formerly: Professor and Chair of the Centre for Linguistics*
*Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India*
*www.andamanese.net* <http://www.andamanese.net/>
On Sat, Jan 5, 2019 at 10:58 PM Johanna NICHOLS <johanna at berkeley.edu>
wrote:
> I think the beauty and utility of "subject" is precisely its
> looseness. If typologists can use it in passing without making a
> precise claim, we can all continue to understand the gist of what is
> meant and work out the precise details later in dedicated work on that
> topic. For new, precisely defined technical concepts let's have new
> terms instead of repurposed existing terms.
>
> I use "dative subject" like that: a dative with subject properties,
> identifiable as a distinct grammatical entity before an exhaustive
> list of subject properties has been drawn up and surveyed across the
> relevant verbal lexicon, and before we all agree on a precise
> definition of "experiencer" that will let me distinguish dative
> subjects from other dative experiencers. And meanwhile I think
> everybody understands what is meant.
>
> Johanna
>
> On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 11:13 PM Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > I think that Ilja Seržant is right: A term like "dative experiencer"
> would be better for constructions like:
> >
> > à Sasha tout lui réussissait (French, cited by Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest)
> > to Sasha all to-her succeeded
> >
> > Calling the dative experiencer (à Sasha) a "non-canonical (dative)
> subject" here (maybe on the basis of its pre-verbal position) is confusing,
> because there are no limits to what could be called a "non-canonical
> subject" – one might propose, for example, to call inanimate objects in
> Spanish non-canonical subjects because they are subject-like in that they
> lack an object-marking preposition.
> >
> > Spike says that the question “what is a non-canonical subject in
> theory?” is ultimately necessary, but I don't think so. An explanatory
> theory might not make use of the notion "subject" at all (and instead rely
> on more fine-grained parameters), let alone the notion of "non-canonical
> subject".
> >
> > What we do need is a general definition of the *term* subject", because
> we use it all the time anyway and it would be best if we used it uniformly.
> Nobody disputes that the transitive A-argument and the intransitive
> S-argument are subjects, so I think it's best to say that "subject" is "A
> or S" (as in Dixon 1994). Since A, S and P are defined in terms of their
> coding properties (Haspelmath 2011), this means that a dative-marked
> argument is never a subject (since A/S are by definition
> nominative/absolutive- or ergative-marked).
> >
> > It is interesting, of course, that some non-A/S arguments share some
> behavioural properties with A/S arguments, but behavioural properties are
> extremely diverse and are not a good basis for terminology. Pre-verbal
> order is extremely common when an argument is the only animate argument of
> a predicate, so dative experiencers will very often be subject-like in this
> regard – but do we want to call this a "subject property" in view of the
> fact that inanimate S-arguments often occur in a later position? It seems
> that word order is more driven by animacy and specificity than by
> semantic/syntactic role. It seems best to define subject/S/A by argument
> coding (flagging and indexing), not by behavioural properties.
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On 04.01.19 17:22, Spike Gildea wrote:
> >
> > First, I thank everyone for sharing examples of dative subjects with
> predicates of success. Alongside the expected examples in Indo-European
> languages of the Slavic, Romance, Germanic, and Indic families, examples
> were proposed from Causasian languages in general (with Akhvakh as an
> example), North Saami and Finnish (Uralic), Hebrew (Semitic), and Japhug
> (Tibeto-Burman) — while there are at least examples outside of IE, this is
> not a particularly robust cross-linguistic attestation of the phenomenon. I
> originally posted the query because I am aware of no examples in the
> non-canonical case-marking languages of South America, and it is
> interesting that nobody has mentioned examples from the language families
> of North America or Austronesia
> > that are known for semantic alignment.
> >
> > Second, with regard to Ilja’s query, there is a long tradition of
> disputing the use of the term “subject” for apparent primary arguments that
> do not bear the canonical case-marking of subjects in a given language, in
> particular for analyses of "dative subjects". Much of Jóhanna’s own work
> (particularly Eythorsson & Barðdal 2005, Barðdal & Eyth̩órsson 2012)
> participates in this dispute, in that she has consistently used a range of
> syntactic tests to distinguish dative subjects from non-subject dative
> experiencers, such as order, raising, reflexivization (both long-distance
> and clause-bound), control infinitives, and conjunction reduction. The
> disputes arise from the fact that these syntactic tests do not give
> consistent results, even in closely related Germanic languages like
> Icelandic, where all such tests show that the only distinction between
> nominative subjects and non-canonical subjects is case-marking and verb
> agreement, and German (which is more akin to the range of other European
> languages), where only a subset of the tests syntactically align potential
> dative subjects with nominative subjects. It is true that different
> theoretical perspectives interpret this phenomenon differently, and in
> particular, some prefer to privilege the term “subject” as a theoretical
> label that should not be assigned on the basis of some (non-specific)
> subset of “subject tests”.
> >
> > In this query, I was hoping to finesse the (ultimately necessary)
> question of “what is a non-canonical subject in theory?” and its
> operational correlate “which criteria should count most in identifying
> them?” That is, I hoped just to use the term “dative subject” as a
> shorthand by which colleagues might recognize constructions in individual
> languages that show a combination of properties that would then constitute
> potentially interesting cases for follow-up. I could re-formulate the query
> in more precise terms as follows: we are looking for indications of
> languages for which (i) predicates of success mark the “succeeder” as a
> dative (or other non-canonical case that could be used to mark recipients
> or benefactives), and (ii) the syntactic properties associated with this
> dative “succeeder” are distinct from clear “indirect object” dative
> arguments in that they share one or more syntactic properties with
> canonical subjects.
> >
> > Best,
> > Spike
> >
> > References
> > Barðdal, Jóhanna & Thórhallur Eythórsson. 2012. ‘Hungering and lusting
> for women and fleshly delicacies’: Reconstructing grammatical relations for
> Proto-Germanic. Transactions of the Philological Society 110(3): 363–393.
> > Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2005. Oblique Subjects: A
> Common Germanic Inheritance. Language 81(4): 824–881.
> >
> >
> > On Jan 3, 2019, at 11:34 PM, Ilja Seržant <ilja.serzants at uni-leipzig.de>
> wrote:
> >
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I apologize for a side remark. But do we call any kind of argumental and
> non-argumental animate (experiencer) dative NP a non-canonical subject? :-)
> Does it really make sense to use the notion of subject that way? Woudn't be
> a term like "dative experiencer" or "dative/recipient-like experiencer" be
> more adequate for a cross-linguistic comparison?
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Ilja
> >
> > Am 21.12.2018 um 17:00 schrieb Spike Gildea:
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > I forward a query from my colleague, Jóhanna Barðdal, who is looking for
> examples of predicates of "success” with non canonical subject marking, in
> particular those that take a dative subject.
> >
> > We are working on Indo-European verbs/predicates with the meanings
> 'succeed', 'be successful', 'make progress', 'turn out well', 'go well'.
> The last one in the sense "he is doing well in his dance class" or even "he
> is doing well in life”.
> >
> >
> > Thank you in advance for indications of other places in the world where
> we might find such predicates taking a dative subject!
> >
> > Best,
> > Spike
> >
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> >
> > --
> > Ilja A. Seržant, postdoc
> > Project "Grammatical Universals"
> > Universität Leipzig (IPF 141199)
> > Nikolaistraße 6-10
> > 04109 Leipzig
> >
> > URL: http://home.uni-leipzig.de/serzant/
> >
> > Tel.: + 49 341 97 37713
> > Room 5.22
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
> > Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> > Kahlaische Strasse 10
> > D-07745 Jena
> > &
> > Leipzig University
> > Institut fuer Anglistik
> > IPF 141199
> > D-04081 Leipzig
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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