Ahzoh wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 4:48 pm
bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 4:27 pm
No, there are many instances where they are very close, e.g.:
The nurse walked him /
The nurse walked with him
Mother is playing with the child /
Mother makes the child play
This kind of thing is essentially the ‘sociative’ category introduced by Shibatani & Pardeshi.
The first example shows complete identicality, but the second example is ambiguous where "mother makes the child play" is not necessarily identical to "mother is playing with the child".
(Note that the case where they’re identical is precisely the sociative category.)
The point I’m making is that, contrary to what you said about the instrumental applicative being closest to a causative, there is another continuum which runs from the comitative through the sociative to the causative. This is all in that paper I linked earlier.
Thanks! This is much more interesting than what I’ve been reading, and seems much more similar to what you have. (Though it seems that there are still some verbs where only the one interpretation or the other is valid.)
Incidentally, I see that they also identify this ‘in-between’ category as a sociative (citing Shibatani & Pardeshi as their source). It would seem that the sociative is just the point where the causative/comitative/instrumental/benefactive distinction completely disappears, and hence the key intermediate point for this kind of ‘universal transitiviser’.
All in all, this is extremely interesting. I may well steal it for my own conlang, which already has just the right diachronic prerequisites for this development. (Namely, a development of an instrumental SVC into a direct object marker, combined with widespread causativisation.)
That’s not what you said, though. Just because the alignment of the subject and object is split on animacy, that doesn’t necessarily mean the indirect object behaves the same way.
The causee and the instrument both go into the primary/direct object slot in this case. The entire thing about causatives and instrumental applicatives is about how said primary/direct object is being made to perform an action itself and so animacy should be relevant.
Well… remember that the causee is affected, as much as it affects something else. So we should already expect its agency to diverge from what we might ‘expect’ given its animacy. Besides, if the sociative is where ‘causee’ and ‘instrument’ become the same thing, then animacy isn’t necessarily the clue to semantic role that we’d like it to be.
Analysis of the secundative is weird. I hear one interpretation that secundative alignment simply makes no distinction between direct object and indirect object, only between primary object and secondary object, whereas I see another interpretation that says the primary is the direct object while the secondary is the indirect object and so the alignment has the arguments essentially "swap" places compared to the typical indirective/dative alignment.
Personally, I just see it as a matter of swapping the case-marking. Is there really much more to it than that?
