Active & stative verbs in biclausal sentences.

[R. Rankin]

> 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.

That's certainly how some Australian languages work.  And if the two subjects
are of different transitivity, one of them has to be changed using an
anti-passive in order that the cases match.  The difference there, of course, is
transitive vs. intransitive but I was interested in seeing if active vs. stative
had the same sort of requirement.  Apparently for some of David's speakers this
was the case.

> 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.

I hope people will do the necessary research and find out the details.  In order
to do that, I'd recommend something like "The man chased the boy and X was
tired".  This avoids problems with degree of animacy and the problem that "deer
don't get tired."

Really interesting stuff.

Bob