Re: [lojban] Active-stative?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Right, so in English "he suffered a blow to the head", "he" has role
"A" even though semantically it is a patient, not an agent, and "a
blow to the head" has role O.  These are syntactic, not semantic
roles.

> 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.

Lojban does also have optional case marking (fa/fe/fi/fo/fu), which is
required when changing the standard order of arguments.

> 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.*

I would say that if "selviska", "seldunda", "seltikpa", "selkalte",
"seljgari", etc. were the basic predicates instead of "viska",
"dunda", "tikpa", "kalte", "jgari", etc, then we would say that Lojban
has ergative/absolutive alignment, simply because for transitive
predicates we would call the x1-case O and the x2-case A, and the case
that aligned with the single argument predicates in that situation
(i.e. the x1-case) would be the one called O. But for Lojban as it is,
it is more natural to call the x1-case of transitive predicates A and
the x2-case O, which results in nominative/accusative alignment.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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