argument structure k'u etc.

[Pamela Munro]

Thanks!

Well, if you define "argument" as "something marked on the verb" (which
is fine, and I thought might be the case), this seems fine -- but in
fact, I think there are other ways to go. For instance, you really can't
freely add random nouns to Lakhota sentences. I think k'u really is
semantically and syntactically completed with three associated
"participants" (to choose a different term, which I often use when
talking with people who will be confused by "argument). I think each of
the three is fully as much a part of the sentence as, say, the subject
of an intransitive -- thus, I think this is a structural feature, not
just a semantic one. (I thought this before, but wondered if you knew
any obscure syntactic tests I was unaware of.)

So I think that 'give' is a ditransitive verb, myself, with three
arguments, but I would just say that in Lakhota only two arguments at
most can be indexed on the verb. (In English, we only index one argument
on the verb!)

Pam

ROOD DAVID S wrote:

>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
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm