Jonlang wrote: ↑Sun Jun 18, 2023 4:32 am
I'm
very tired* and I don't know what the actual terms are or how to properly describe them, but "I see her come" is, as you can see, the subject seeing the object doing something, hence "subject verb" and "object verb" in my description. But "I see that she comes", making "her" the subject of a dependant clause could also work, I think.
I’d say that
both constructions are complement clauses, just of different types — note that English has an unusually large and varied inventory of complement clauses compared to most languages (SOV or not). In ‘I see [that she comes]’, the complement clause is fully finite and introduced with ‘that’, whereas in ‘I see her [come]’ it is a so-called bare infinitive, analogous in surface structure to (say) ‘I want her [to come]’.
The problem I'm having here is making sure the final verb and initial subject agree, which they should in SOV
I don’t see what this has to do with SOV in any way. Why should agreement in SOV languages work any differently to agreement in any other language?
… and not confusing them with any other verbs concerned with objects.
I’m not sure what you mean by this.
"I threw the ball to John, but Kate caught it" would, I think, be:
Code: Select all
pron.1st.SG.NOM ball.SG.ACC J.DAT throw.SG.PST, but K.NOM pron.3rd.ACC catch.SG.PST
Yes, that seems reasonable.
But consider: "I saw John coming with a ball, but Kate saw John throw it". For these I see them as the following parts: I saw (sub) / John coming (obj) / a ball (obj) // Kate saw (subj) / John throw (obj) / it (the ball) (obj).
To me this feels like you’re ignoring the tree structure of the sentence. I’d write it as:
I saw John [coming [with a ball]PP]secondary predicate, but Kate saw John [throw it]subordinate.
(Note:
I saw John coming is a very different construction to
I saw John come! They have to be, since ‘coming’ is functionally an adjective or noun, whereas ‘come’ is clearly a verb. I’m not sure how valid my analysis is of the former as being an instance of ‘secondary predication’, but it seems to line up with the usual usage of that term.)
How this gets translated into your language would depend on how it deals with the various adjuncts — which, by the way, has very little to do with whether it’s SOV or SVO. If it treats them as sentence-like dependent clauses, it might look like:
I-NOM [that John-NOM ball-COM is.coming.3s] saw.1s, but Kate-NOM [that John-NOM it-ACC threw.3s] saw.3s
On the other hand, if it treated them as nominalisations, it might look more like:
I-NOM [John’s ball-COM come-ing]-ACC saw.1s, but Kate-NOM [John’s throw-ing]-ACC saw.3s
(Don’t treat the case-marking here too seriously: it would have to be determined by language-specific rules.)
Or it might even use a completely different structure to English, say by using switch-reference and eliding some of the arguments:
[John-NOM ball-COM come-DS] saw-1s, [threw-DS] Kate-NOM saw-3s
(Where ‘DS’ means ‘different.subject’, indicating that this clause is subordinate to the following clause but has a different subject.)
And then of course there’s numerous other ways of doing it: the comitative could be at the beginning of the sentence or after the verb (assuming the language isn’t rigidly V-final, which you said it isn’t), or it might use a different conjunction (or none, as in the last example), or nominalised verbs might take their arguments in different ways, or sentence-like dependent clauses might be marked using something other than a complementiser, or be unmarked… the possibilities are endless!
So, my mind says this ought to be:
Code: Select all
pron.1st.SG.NOM J.ACC ball.SG.COM come.SG.PRES see.SG.PST, but K.NOM J.ACC pron.3rd.SG throw.SG.PRES see.SG.PST
This would be a fine alternative too. Explicitly indicating the clause structure (and condensing the gloss a little bit):
I John-ACC [ball-COM come.SG] saw.SG, but Kate-NOM John-ACC [he throw.SG] see.SG
Which shows that this is assuming a language where complement clauses have a sentence-like form, but the case-marking indicates that raising-to-object also takes place (or possibly subject control; I’m not entirely sure which one).