Active & stative verbs in biclausal sentences.

[ROOD DAVID S]

Van is right about the problem in the book leading to these conclusions,
but I've elicited contradictory data.  Some speakers insist that the
intransitive verb picks up the argument that matches in case with the
transtitive verb; "The boy chased the deer and (x) was tired" can only
mean "the deer was tired", whereas "The man saw the woman and ran away"
can only mean that the man ran away.  Other speakers tell me that you
simply can't tell from the isolated sentence alone -- the example that was
used for testing was "she started the car and shook", and you can't tell
whether the driver or the car shook.  As far as I know, these are all
sentences with "na" as the conjunction; I haven't explored the use of
"cha" here.  My guess is you're going to get different judgements
depending on the degree of dominance of Lak. over English; the first group
of speakers I mentioned above were the most fluent I ever had the
privilege of working with.


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Robert VanValin wrote:

> In my book 'Syntax' with R. LaPolla (CUP, 1997), I have a homework
> problem in the grammatical relations chapter (pp. 311-13) using data I
> collected back when I was working on my dissertation.  It includes data
> on the issues you raise.
>
> > Would the sentence, without any noun or pronoun mentioned for X, mean
> > "the boy chased the deer and he (the boy) was very tired" OR would it
> > mean "The boy chased the deer and he (the deer) was very tired."?  Or
> > would it simply remain ambiguous?  How do speakers treat this?
>
> If the conjunction is 'na', then only 'the boy' can be interpreted as
> the one who is tired; when the conjunction is 'cha', then it's possible
> to interpret 'the deer' as the one who is tired.  The different
> interpretations seem to be a function of the different conjunctions.
>
> Van
>
>
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