[Lingtyp] demotion

[Jess Tauber]

I've understood incorporation (at least in the sense used in polysynthetic
morphosyntax) to involve the notion of backgrounding. It never occurred to
me to think of demotion being associated with this. Polysynthetic languages
tend to have many fewer ideophones than agglutinating languages, in
general. Ideophones often have excess prosody, and in their prototypical
state aren't even really in the core syntax, but are set off by pauses,
acting like a sort of punctuation. Incorporated forms could be thought of
as the inverse of this.

Jess Tauber

On Mon, Oct 9, 2023 at 1:12 PM Christian Lehmann <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> I have a partly conceptual, partly terminological question: Do you know of
> any substantive arguments to decide the question whether incorporation may
> be considered a form of demotion? To explain:
>
> A hierarchy of syntactic functions along the lines of 'subject - direct
> object - indirect object - other complement - adjunct' is assumed. Demotion
> is by definition the shift of an actant (some people prefer 'argument')
> from its (relatively high) position to a lower position on this
> hierarchy.The shift is generally accompanied by occupying the freed
> position by something else, so the demoted actant is "ousted".
>
> Since the incorporated position of a nominal expression is not a syntactic
> function (but rather a morphological one), the straightforward answer to
> the introductory question would be 'no'. However:
>
>    - There is no sharp boundary between syntax and morphology, so a
>    gradience that starts in the syntax might end in the morphology.
>    - Something occupying a relatively low hierarchical position generally
>    becomes optional. If it is omitted, it somehow disappears from the
>    syntactic structure. This could also be said of an incorporated nominal.
>    - An incorporated nominal often frees its syntactic position -
>    generally, the direct-object or absolutive position -, so this may be
>    occupied by something else. Thus, in ergative syntax, if the undergoer is
>    incorporated, the actor does not remain in the ergative, but becomes the
>    absolutive actant.
>
> So there would at least seem to be some similarity between demotion (of a
> direct object or absolutive actant) and its incorporation. If demotion is
> not the appropriate cover term, should I subsume both phenomena under
> something else?
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231009/4816c2a2/attachment.htm>