Re: VMs: excessive frequency of doubles...

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> For instance, in Basque:
> Martinek egunkariak erosten dizkit.
> By-Martin the-newspapers buy "dizkit"
> where "dizkit" indicates a present tense plural verb with the indirect object
> "me". (Basque is ergative, so the verb agrees in number with what in English
> is the direct object.)

Well, of course, linguists like to warn against thinking of ergative
sentences as passsive (as in the glossing here), though I admit it has
always helped me to keep track of what is going on!

Another way of thinking about ergative languages is observe that the
subject of transitive verbs (A) has its own case, and that the subject of
intransitive verbs (S) and the object of transitive verbs (O) share a
case.  In an "accusative" language like most of the others in Europe, the
sharing of case forms is between the subject of intransitive verbs and the
subject of transitive verbs (S and A) and it's the object of transitives
(O) - the accusative form - that's the odd man out.  There are known
historical processes by which accusative languages can become ergative
over time, or vice versa.  The Polynesian family is one enormous lab
experiment in these processes.

As far as verb inflection, the general assessment of Basque in linguistic
terms is that most verbs are inflected periphrastically with the aid of
two auxiliaries - one transitive and one intransitive (have and be?).
These periphrastically inflected verbs exist only in participial form.
The number of verbs other than these auxiliaries that can be more or less
fully inflected varies with the dialect of Basque, but can usually be
counted easily on the fingers, with fingers left over.  This emphasis on
periphrasis is a pattern that occurs elsewhere around the world, though
it's a minority pattern.  Presumably ancestral Basque was able to inflect
most verbs fully, though perhaps not so complexly.  Inflection, like
periphrasis can come and go across time.

French, with its emphasis on the periphrastic past perfect in lieu of the
simple past, has taken a step in the periphrastic direction, but only in
the past tense so far.  Some students of the Germanic languages argue that
the weak/regular/dental pasts (e.g., English -ed pasts) originate in an
absorbed auxiliary verb of this nature.  Similar explanations are offered
for the -b(a)- imperfects in Latin.  We have the advantage in these cases
of knowing that these developments are new and unique to the language
groups or languages in question, and don't exist in a range of more
distant relatives, whereas with lonesome Basque we can only argue by
analogy with these known cases.

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list