[Lingtyp] incipient ergativity conditioned by number of A

Thu Jun 1 17:36:36 UTC 2023

Hi again,
deindividualizing the agent means the responsibility is not clearly
attributed to all members of the institution, at least in my understanding.
In the Italian counterpart to the Hebrew construction you can say (real
example from a newspaper):
Nel Pd si sostiene che questa sia una posizione per prendere tempo
in_the PD they argue that this is a position to gain time
"In the Democratic Party they argue that this is a position to buy time"
One can also make the PD subject of the clause (Il PD sostiene ...).
The difference for me is that the locative phrase implies that some members
of the party, not necessarily all, argue so and so, whereas the alternative
clause implies a more unitarian view.
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 19:16 Oleg Belyaev <
belyaev at ossetic-studies.org> ha scritto:

> 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
>>
>>
>> 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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