Re: [lojban] Re: Active-stative?

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 5:55 PM, tijlan <jbotijlan@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> The gimste says about "sance":
>
>  x2 sounds (intransitive verb)

i.e. the intransitive English verb "to sound" (as opposed to the
transitive English verb "to sound".

As in "the bell sounds", not as in "John sounds the bell".

The comment is about the English verb, not about the Lojban predicate.

> 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".

It depends on what you mean by "non-existent". In Lojban, every sumti
can be dropped when not required by context, either replaced by "zo'e"
or by nothing, depending on the requirements of word-order. "sance da"
is equivalent to "zo'e sance da".

>  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.

It's equivalent to:

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

The core arguments are all left implicit.

>>  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?

Any Lojban speaker, whatever their background, would interpret "lo
nanmu" as being in x1-case and "lo nanla" as being in x2-case.

x1-case is the case that is common to all intransitive predicates, and
to one of the arguments of transitive predicates.

Languages that use the same case for all intransitive predicates and
for the case that most often corresponds to the agent in transitive
predicates are said to have nominative-accusative alignment.

Languages that use the same case for all intransitive predicates and
for the case that most often corresponds to the patient in transitive
predicates are said to have ergative-absolutive alignment.

Lojban in principle could fall into either of those two types, but
because in the basic lexicon the x1 is more often the case of the
agent rather than the patient, the natural classification is as
nominative-accusative alignment.


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

Basque "-ak" will sometimes be translated by suitable word order,
sometimes by "gau", but the classification of Lojban in a given
morphosyntactic alignment type is completely internal to Lojban, it
has nothing to do with how this or that is translated from other
languages.


> 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)

Which in Lojban is not the case. In Lojban the sole core argument of
an intransitive predicate is always "fa" or its positional equivalent:
being in first position before the selbri.


> 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?

By definition?

> 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?

BAIs and other tags may add non-core arguments to a predicate, they
don't replace the core arguments.

> 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?

It's the x1-argument, calling it "subject" doesn't add anything. It is
the argument that shares the same case as the sole case of single
argument predicates.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.