[Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A

[Dmitri Sitchinava]

In Ukraine (both in Ukrainian and in Russian) a popular journalistic
construction since 2019 has been *U Zelenskoho zajavyly '*At Zelensky's
(impersonal) they-said'*, *implying that Zelensky was not quite an
independent actor and his spokesmen had a kind of collective institutional
agentivity. Later it was extended to *u Putina *etc., being now a default
construction for spokesmen.

Dmitri


Am Do., 1. Juni 2023 um 09:56 Uhr schrieb Silvia Luraghi <luraghi at unipv.it>:

> Dear David,
> I agree with Chrsitian and Sebastian, this is a way of deindividualizing
> the agent and rather than with number it is connected with
> collective/institutional referents. In Italian you find the same,
> especially in journalistic discourse, e.g.
> Nel PD ci si interroga sulla linea da tenere
> in_the PD one REFL asks on_the line to keep
> "In the Democratic Party they wonder what line they should adopt"
> Interestingly, this is ok with collective nouns that are morphologically
> singular but with nouns that are morphologically plural you cannot use
> plural articles, you must treat them as if they were not count plurals:
> Nella Lega ci si interroga ... OK
> in_the(SG)  Lega(SG) ...
> *Nei Fratelli d'Italia ci si interroga... (impossible)
> in_the(PL) Fratelli(PL) d'Italia
> In Fratelli d'Italia ci si interroga... OK (here the preposition in comes
> without the article)
> Silvia
>
> Silvia Luraghi
> Università di Pavia
> Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Sezione di Linguistica
> Strada Nuova 65
> I-27100 Pavia
> tel.: +39/0382/984685
> Web page personale: https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=68
>
>
> Il giorno gio 1 giu 2023 alle ore 09:18 Sebastian Nordhoff <
> sebastian.nordhoff at glottotopia.de> ha scritto:
>
>> Dear David,
>> in both Sinhala and Sri Lanka Malay, institutional actors (government,
>> board, committee, police) are marked with the instrumental. I suppose
>> that your Likud examples would get the instrumental as well in those
>> languages.
>>
>> You write that [number] seems to be the relevant factor. But if you have
>> "one baker" and "thirteen bakers", you would probably not get the
>> difference. So it might be more the feature [+institutional] or
>> [+collective], as you say.
>>
>> When looking into the instrumental in the Sri Lankan languages, I was
>> wondering whether British English agreement ("The committee have
>> discussed ... ") and Dutch feminine institutional reference ("het
>> kabinet en haar beleid" 'the cabinet[N] and her[F] policies') are
>> actually triggered by the same semantics. I found that interesting since
>> this is a grammatical fact that relies on the society having some kind
>> of bureaucracy, which poses interesting questions with regard to
>> innateness.
>> Best wishes
>> Sebastian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 6/1/23 06:43, David Gil wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > Is anybody familiar with a case of split ergativity in which the
>> > conditioning factor is the number of the Agent NP?
>> >
>> > My reason for asking:in Hebrew, especially in a journalese register, in
>> > a transitive A V P construction, when the A is semantically plural,
>> > typically denoting a collective entity, it is often marked with the
>> > locative proclitic /b-/ while the verb takes plural subject agreement
>> in
>> > an apparent impersonal construction.For example, in a sentence about
>> the
>> > Likud political party:
>> >
>> > balikud muxanim lidħot et hamahapexa hamišpatit ...
>> >
>> > LOC-Likud prepare:3.PLM INF-postpone ACC DEF-revolution
>> > DEF-legislative.F ...
>> >
>> > idiomatically: 'The Likud is willing to postpone the legislative
>> > revolution ...'
>> >
>> > literally: 'In the Likud they're willing to postpone the legislative
>> > revolution ...'
>> >
>> > Such constructions are extremely widespread in journalistic writing.The
>> > above example, part of a newspaper headline, is followed by a string of
>> > several clauses all exhibiting the same construction, each beginning
>> > with a semantically plural agent marked with locative /b-:/ 'in the
>> > ruling party', 'in closed rooms', 'in the other side', etc.
>> > [https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/bk5kubsin#autoplay]
>> >
>> > In the above construction, the locative proclitic /b-/ seems to be
>> > approaching the function of an ergative marker, albeit a rather
>> atypical
>> > one: in particular, when the P is definite, as in the above example, it
>> > is marked with the definite direct object, thereby retaining accusative
>> > alignment.
>> >
>> > I wonder whether anybody has come across similar constructions, in
>> which
>> > an incipient or apparent ergative case marking system is licensed by
>> > number (rather than by more commonly-cited features such as aspect or
>> > person).
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > David
>> >
>> >
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