[Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A
Oleg Belyaev
belyaev at ossetic-studies.org
Thu Jun 1 17:05:08 UTC 2023
In the Russian media (in Russia), an exact equivalent of the Hebrew
construction cited by David, with an institutional agent, is more
common: /V Gosdume zajavili… /'in the State Duma (they) said…', /V RPC
zajavili… /'in the Russian Orthodox Church they said…' It is commonly
used when citing some spokesperson from said institution, not even
necessarily an official representative. In fact I share Eitan's
intuition for Hebrew that this implies that the action was not taken /
the opinion is not held univocally.
- Oleg
01.06.2023 13:06, Dmitri Sitchinava пишет:
> 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
> <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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