From thorinn@diku.dk Sat Mar 6 22:46:37 2010 Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 19:21:12 +0100 Comment: Issues related to constructed languages Originator: conlang@diku.dk Errors-To: thorinn@diku.dk Version: 5.5 -- Copyright (c) 1991/92, Anastasios Kotsikonas From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt) Subject: Re: Agents Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Mar 22 13:21:31 1995 X-From-Space-Address: conlang@diku.dk Message-ID: DLS9@aol.com (Guido) said: > A question arises as to why langs don't (or only rarely?) put >them into three separate categories. Efficiency? [ In regard to > transitive subject, intransitive subject, and transitive object ] Grammatical role marking is necessary to disambiguate sentences. There are (at least) three mechanisms that can achieve this: - word order - adpositions (e.g. prepositions) - case inflection The three categories in question do in fact get adequately disambiguated in any language, when you take all these mechanisms into account, so there *are* three categories, not just two. The fact that only two are marked might be called efficiency, I suppose. But it's important to note that this is not purely a matter of case inflection, since that's only one of the three mechanisms. >And could >ergative-language-speakers even be said to think of their intr subjs as >agents at all? That was what I was groping at earlier. All speakers of all languages think, at least at times, in terms of cause and effect, and in terms of agents of cause. Linguistically there is a strong separate between grammatical roles (where the role of agent might not exist) and semantic roles (where the role of agent does always exist). A lot of confusion can arise if you don't keep grammatical roles mentally separated from semantic roles. Naturally they can be strongly related, but in principle they can be unrelated. Consider: "I turned on the oven. An hour later, the cake was baked." The latter sentence is grammatically passive, but semantically there is an obvious agent. Doug