argument structure k'u etc.

[ROOD DAVID S]

Hi, Pam,
	Thanks for the question.  To my way of thinking, the decisive
behavioral property is the indexing on the verb.  When there is morphology
to make the distinction, e.g. "the chiefs gave the horses to the women",
women will be indexed, and horses will not.  Contrast the causatives,
which have the morphological tools for expressing three arguments: I made
you buy the horses can be s^uNkawakhaN ki ophewichathun-chiye.
	I can't think of any purely syntactic tests for deciding if
something is an "argument" or not, and I agree that all my instincts tell
me that the direct object in English should also be an argument in
Lakhota.  I just think the internal structure of the language denies that.
I think linguistic description (theory?) should distinguish grammatical
(subject, object) categories from semantic (agent, patient) ones.
	David
	David


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

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Pamela Munro wrote:

> David,
>
> Of course I agree with you that Lakhota 'give' only marks two arguments
> on the verb. But can you explain why you feel the patient (I agree with
> you that it doesn't seem right to call it either an accusative or a
> direct object) is not an argument? Is there syntactic evidence that,
for
> example, in a sentence with three nouns ('The chief gave the horse to
> the woman', or the like) the patient ('horse') behaves syntactically
> different from 'woman'?
>
> Pam
>
> ROOD DAVID S wrote:
>
> >Many languages, like Lakhota, do not use datives for the recipient of the
> >verb 'give': 'give' is syntactically transitive, not ditransitive; only
> >two participants are indexed in the verb, and one of them is the
> >recipient.  The so-called accusative or direct object is not an argument.
> >
> >
>
> --
> Pamela Munro,
> Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
> UCLA Box 951543
> Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
> http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm
>
>