Re: VSO languages? (was: Prefix languages?)

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

> connolly@msuvx1.memst.edu said:
: The problem is considerably more complex.  Part of the problem is that
: linguists -- including me -- are too often tempted to make the traditional
: [...]
: What of subjects and objects?  Well, though subjects in languages of the
: normal Western European type, such as English, do tend to make the doer
: of the action (if there is one) the subject -- but they don't have to;
: it's perfectly OK to say "Charlie was arrested by the sheriff."

Here the subject and object of the sentence are reversed by the use of
passive voice.  Clearly, the meaning of "Charlie was arrested by the
sheriff" and "Charlie arrested the sheriff" is different.  I don't know
if linguistics consider "Charlie" or "sheriff" the "subject" of the
passive-voice sentence, but I think the "sheriff" is the "true" subject.

: What's a subject?  Very simple: a noun or pronoun which
: in some particular language gets this special treatment reserved for one
: noun or pronoun per clause -- whatever that treatment may be.

I see.  When we analyze a sentence using predicate logic (i.e.,
arrest(sheriff(), Charlie())), I think we can take everything as a
function, so:  A noun would be a function without arguments; and a verb
or an adjective would be a function with one or more arguments.  And the
"subject" would be the "first argument" of the verb function, which (as
you pointed out) doesn't have to be the "active argument" at all.

(Here, some particular "features" of English are making thinking
generally about all kinds of languages a bit more difficult.)

: Finally, someone else claimed in a post that the notion of "subject" may
: not apply in "ergative" languages such as Basque.  Ergative languages have
: subjects all right, but they identify them on different principles.  When
: a verb has a "doer" and a "receiver of the action", we would make the
: doer the subject -- they make the receiver the subject and give it exactly
: the same treatment they would give to the only noun in sentences such as
: _The children are running_, _The woman is tired_ etc.

Would that be a language with the "passive argument" always
being the "first argument" to the verb?

: Someone (if anyone is still reading) will jump on this and say that the
: doer of the action in active or ergative languages is the "syntactic
: subject".  There's no need for such a concept.  It turns out that in
: all the languages I know, two sorts of nouns and pronouns are syntacti-
: cally important: subjects in the sense that I have used the term, and
: the noun or pronoun which ranks highest in a semantic hierarchy -- what
: I called "most active" above.  These can just be called "highest ranking
: NP"; there's no particular reason to say they're a separate sort of
: subject, or (quod Deus avertat) the *only* subject.

: So: is a distinction between noun and verb necessary?  Apparently yes; at
: least, all languages make distinctions, though some much more clearly than
: others.

As I said above, the "everything's a function" (i.e., lambda calculus)
concept, when applied to designing (artificial) languages, can result in
no distinctions between nouns and verbs being needed.  For example, in a
postfix artificial language based on lambda calculus (where "postfix"
means "all the function arguments (if any) comes *before* the function
name), the sentence "The sheriff arrested Charlie" would become "Sheriff
Charlie arrest."  (Of course, the tenses of verbs are being ignored
here.)

Some kinds of ambiguity in English can be avoided this way.  For
example, the sentence "They are flying airplanes" have several different
meanings in (simplified) predicate logic:  "flying(they, airplanes)",
"be(they, flying(airplanes))", etc.  In the abovementioned postfix
language, these meanings would become:  "Fly airplanes they" and "They
airplanes flying be".

But (just as in any other language) the only way to *completely* avoid
ambiguity is to use parenthesis-like devices to denote the "number of
arguments" to each function.  The problem is that, given a certain
function, there might be different number of arguments to it, and there
are even "optional arguments" identified by "keywords/prepositions".
For instance:  "He gave."  "He gave it."  "He gave it to her."

Without parenthesis-like devices, the sentence "He saw the boy with a
telescope" == "saw(he, boy, use:telescope)" would also mean "saw(he,
have(boy, telescope))" -- the same ambiguity would still exist with the
sentence "he boy with:telescope saw".

: Are subjects and objects necessary?  Certainly not.  This is just one
: possible way to encode the difference between "doers" and "receivers of
: the action".  And in fact, not all languages have them.

Agree...  In fact, when I come to think of it, it is rather strange that
a number of languages *do* use the doer/receiver difference to
distinguish subjects and objects, and even more languages have the
distinction between subjects and objects.

: Are categorizations such as SVO justified?  Are they useful?  In general,
: yes -- but it gets really hairy when linguists start fighting about what
: is the "real" or "syntactic" subject of some sentence.  For instance,
: Spanish is said to be SVO, with the proviso that object *pronouns* must
: [...]
: So SVO and its ilk are sometimes accurate for a given language, sometimes
: misleading, though accidentlally right much of the time (as with Spanish),
: and sometimes, according to other posters, irrelevant.

Here I see three kinds of distinctions, all getting confused with
English:
    - subject/object
    - first argument/other arguments
    - before verb/after verb