On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 10:06, tijlan
<jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/4/11 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 10:06 PM, tijlan <
jbotijlan@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Also worth
> noting is that, unlike Esperanto, Lojban isn't overtly specific
about its
> morphosyntactic alignment; while Esperanto is explicitly
> nominative-accusative, Lojban is not. (In fact, I'm not sure which
Lojban
> belongs to. Could it be the active-stative?)
nominative-accusative? It seems to me that it is exactly that: the
single case of intransitive predicates (the x1-case) is treated
exactly like one of the cases of transitive predicates (the x1-case
again)
For instance:
senci
has only one argument, so it's an intransitive predicate with a subject.
sumne has two arguments, one of which is defined as
"experiencer" and as the x1, but it's not unambiguously the agent (the
participant in a situation
that carries out the action in this situation) so long as the x2 can be
considered as the primary cause of the experience of smelling but yet
not unambiguously as the agent either from a common viewpoint. According
to Wikipedia, the linguist David Dowty suggests (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_%28grammar%29)
that, in
His energy surprised everyone.
,
His energy is
the agent, "even though it does not have most of the typical agent-like
qualities
such as perception, movement, or volition". From that viewpoint, it
would be reasonable to say
sumne's x2 is the agent. In fact, the
gimste offers varying definitions in terms of the arguments' roles:
a.
x1 smells/scents x2 b.
x2 smells/has odor/scent to
observer x1
Although a very few languages do have alignment based solely on semantic considerations, most do not. It's almost always the case that alignment has nothing to do with what is, semantically, the "agent" and what semantically whatever other theta-role theorists will map onto it; alignment is only about how the arguments of predicates align with each other syntactically.
In Lojban, which lacks case marking and relies on word order in order to determine which slot of the predicate a given argument goes in, it is the ordering of those elements that tells us about alignment. As .xorxes. noted, if Lojban were a split-S language, we'd find that some gismu with only one slot take an x1, while others take only an x2. But, this isn't the case: ALL gismu have an x1 slot; they don't all have an x2 slot. Thus, the x1 slot of single-argument gismu align with the x1 of two+-argument gismu.
And the interpretation of cases starts to appear
even more undecided/speaker-dependent when we take into account the
following situation.
If native English speakers see
da sumne de, they would
probably generally take the definition (a) and consider the x1
nominative:
[NOMINATIVE] [verb] [ACCUSATIVE]The
same for native Japanese speakers, despite their different word order:
[NOMINATIVE] [ACCUSATIVE] [verb]But what if native
Basque speakers see
da de sumne? It syntactically corresponds to
the Basque ergative allignment:
[ERGATIVE] [ABSOLUTIVE]
[verb]
That is, they would by tendency see
de (
sumne's x2) in
the same way that they see an intransitive predicate's subject like the
x1 of
blabi;
da blabi syntactically corresponds in Basque
to
[ABSOLUTIVE] [verb]And it's the same for predicates
the x1 of which appears in the English version of the gimste as
nominative and the x2 as accusative, such as
viska:
x1
sees/views/perceives visually x2 under conditions x3
For Basque speakers, this x2 would naturally appear as
absolutive and they would treat it in the same way as they would treat
an intransitive predicate's x1 and describe it as such if they ever make
a Lojban-Basque dictionary. Wikipedia has a Basque example of
The
man saw the boy. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative%E2%80%93absolutive_language#Morphological_ergativity):
Gizonak mutila ikusi du.
[gizon-ak] [mutil-a] [ikusi du]
[man-ERG]
[boy-ABS] [saw]
, which naturally corresponds to
[lo
nanmu] [lo nanla] [pu viska]Unlike Esperanto, Lojban does
not morphologically (and syntactically, for that matter) mark cases, so
the interpretation is usefully up to the listener/reader.
You can't say that those two things correspond. In Basque, it is the case markers than give the interpretation; in Lojban, it is the order of the things. The Basque example could equally well be:
Mutila gizonak ikusi du.
[mutil-a] [gizon-ak] [ikusi du]
[boy-ABS] [man-ERG] [saw]
which still corresponds to Lojban [lo nanmu] [lo nanla] [pu viska].
The only way I can think of to get Lojban to have an ergative/absolutive alignment, given the strict word order, would be to have some gismu which have two slots syntactically, but only one sematically, so that the first always has {zo'e}. Or, alternatively, that there are some gismu which simply can't have any of the arguments in their predicate placed before the verb.*
The main thing you've missed here is what the case marking is doing it Basque: it's marking what ordering does in Lojban. Basque -ak is equal, (very roughly, -ish) to x2; absolutive to x1. Why? Because, in Basque, the absolutive is the case that shows up if you have an intransitive verb, in just the same way that x1 is what shows up in Lojban when you have only one place in the structure of the predicate.
> and for transitive predicates the x1-case is the one that
>
usually corresponds to the agent, just like the subject case in
>
nominative-accusative.
Whether or not a transitive
predicate's x1 is the agent does not at least in the above examples
affect Basque speakers' interpretation of the x2-case;
gizonak is
the agent, but it's of ergative case, and
mutila of absolutive
case. And there is nothing which would prohibit them from interpreting
lo
nanmu lo nanla pu viska in the same native scheme of theirs. Even
if
lo nanmu is explicitly marked as the agent with
gau,
they would associate it with their native eargative marker
-ak,
while native Japanese speakers would associate it with their nominative
marker
-ga.
Active-stative would require that some intransitive verbs have an
x1-case only while others have an x2-case only, which is never the
case (unless you are thinking of things like "zi'o broda", but I doubt
it's fair to use such unusual cases for the classification).
For
one thing, Lojban has certain characteristics of fluid-S, a subtype of
active-stative. Wikipedia defines fluid-S (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_stative)
as:
[...] the marking of the
intransitive argument is decided by the speaker based
on semantic considerations. That is, for any given intransitive
verb the speaker may choose whether to mark
the subject as agentive or patientive, with agentive marking implying a
degree of volition or control, and patientive
implying lack of volition or control, suffering, or sympathy on the part
of the speaker.
Consider single-argument intransitive
predicates like
sipna. In
da sipna,
da, unmarked,
is either agentive or patientive: when
da ri'a sipna, it's
patientive; when
da segau sipna, it's agentive.
It's the same for multiple-argument intransitive predicates like
sakli.
In
da sakli de,
da, unmarked, is again either agentive or
patientive: when
da ri'a sakli de, it's patientive; when
da
segau sakli de, it's agentive.
Also,
tu'a and
jai can make the intransitive argument
either the agent or the object of a transitive verb -- the arbitrary
marking of which is what is commonly defined as the main feature of
active-stative.
No, the speaker cannot decide the semantic interpretation. If this were the case, it would be like what I said above. If there is some gismu that needs an experiencer, you'd end up with "zo'e zo'e x3" as the argument, say. But this doesn't happen. If a gismu takes one argument, that argument goes in x1.
> There are more to the similarity between Lojban and Japanese, but
I'm having
> difficulty putting it into English. For one thing, briefly, the
distinction
> between the subject, object, and complement in Japanese is not as
important
> as in English, which has led some notable Japanese linguists to
suggest that
> every verb argument in this language is basically a complement of
equal
> significance in its relation to the predicate, which sounds like
what terbri
> are to its selbri in Lojban.
I would agree that the distinction is less important than in
English,
but there is still a distinction. The x1-case especially has very
distinct properties compared with the other cases, and the x2-case to
a lesser extent also has some special properties with respect to the
rest.
They may have distinct properties,
but the point is that one argument is not more significant than the
others. viska's x1 is not more important than its x2, while in
English see's x1 (the subject) is more important than its x2 as
evidenced by such facts as that I see that. can be reduced to I
see. but not formally to See that. In Lojban and Japanese, mi
viska | watasi-wa miru, viska ra | sore-o miru and viska |
miru are equally valid. (Such ellipsis is also possible in some
European languages like Spanish and Polish, but they differ from the
pair in question in that their arguments inflect.) English prioritises
the subject and formally requires its presence in an indicative
sentence, as in It rains., which cannot formally be Rains.
But so what if English "prioritizes subject" and other languages don't? The point is that Lojban "prioritizes" the x1 slot in the same way. What you're really trying to say with "prioritize," I think, is which tends to be required by the grammar--in English, this is most obviously the subject (although it is not as clear-cut a case as you say; English can drop both subjects and objects given the right context), and in Lojban, the x1. Both English and Lojban, in this way, are VERY nominative/accusative languages.
Chris
*Actually, this was kind of interesting to think about--Lojban is so ridiculously nominative/accusative that it is hard to even imagine how you could get an ergative system...