[Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A

Thu Jun 1 13:10:11 UTC 2023

Hi all,

In the Hebrew case I am not sure it deindividualizes the agent, or maybe I
don't know what that means exactly when the agent referent is a collective.
The construction has a rather specific meaning, which is indeed
collective/institutional but contrasts with the construction with an
unmarked S/A, namely, that there are those within the group that PREDICATE,
with this implicature that it is a significant number.

This implicature is cancellable, which is *not* the case with the unmarked
S/A construction. So in David's example, you could easily follow this with
a sentence like "But their number is small." In contrast, the Hebrew
equivalent of the sentence "The Likud is willing...." could not easily be
followed by "But their number is small" or anything like that. I don't know
what happens in the other languages that have been mentioned here.

So it seems that the unmarked S/A construction has the
collective/institutional meaning, while the locative-marked S/A seems to
mean that the action was not taken univocally. Probably more examples would
help to clear this up.

Eitan

Eitan Grossman
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tel: +972 2 588 3809

On Thu, Jun 1, 2023 at 10:56 AM Silvia Luraghi <luraghi at unipv.it> wrote:

> 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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