[lojban] Re: Active-stative?

[tijlan <jbotijlan@googlemail.com>]

On Apr 11, 7:14 pm, Christopher Doty <suomich...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Can prepositions like BAI determine such slots?


>  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.

The gimste says about "sance":

 x2 sounds (intransitive verb)

This seems to be assuming that, in the form of "sance da", the x1 is
non-existent even without explicitly marking so with "zi'o".


> > 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#Mor...
> > ):
>
> > * 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 interpretation"? That's something Lojban can give without the
expression of the word order, isn't it? Example:

 to'o lo zdani cu klama zu'e mi sepi'o lo karce

It has nothing relevant to "klama"s place structure, and still makes
possible the interpretation of what otherwise the alignment of
"klama"s x1, x3, and x5 could give.


>  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].*

But is there anything which would in practice prevent Basque speakers
to interpret "lo nanmu" as ergative and "lo nanla" as absolutive?


> 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}.

Is that something like "mi jai galfi ra", in which "mi" is other than
a semantic argument pertaining to "galfi"s place structure?


> 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.

Does that mean that what Basque "-ak" does cannot be translated into
Lojban by means of other than word ordering, like "gau"?


> No, the speaker cannot decide the semantic interpretation.

I know Wikipedia isn't a perfect linguistics reference, but I thought
that was what was meant by:
 "the marking of the intransitive argument is decided by the speaker
based on semantic considerations."
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_stative)


> 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.

But why should the prescriptive ordering of unmarked arguments (i.e.
place structure) be the ONLY morphosyntactic alignment ("the system
used to distinguish between the arguments of transitive verbs and
those of intransitive verbs") in Lojban? An experiencer can be marked
with "ri'i", so why should "ri'i da" not mean what the hypothetical
"zo'e zo'e x3" would mean?


> 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.

How do we know the x1 of a multi-argument predicate is a subject,
outside the nominative English (etc.) definition of its place
structure? "mi viska ra" -- Why should this "mi" exclusively be the
subject by default?


mu'o mi'e tijlan

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