Vardelm wrote: ↑Mon Mar 21, 2022 10:07 am
Note that the above current version just adds/changes a voice suffix to the predicate verb and swaps the position of the active and stative arguments. The new version below adds the same suffix. However, the referents change positions, but the inverse argument marking stays in the same order as the direct, unlike the original system.
Ah, so Jin now has Austronesian alignment!
(Or at least, as near as makes no difference. It’s only slightly more elaborate than the split-S system of Indonesian-type languages.)
I found that if a sentence like this starts with an active verb (like "strangle, squeeze") and the second verb is a resulting state of the patient, then I can probably use a stative intransitive verb for that second verb since both the transitive patient and the intransitive subject are stative.
Yes, this was precisely the point I was trying to make with my previous post: if you don’t restrict yourself to subject sharing, you can achieve ‘nice’ coreference even between active and stative verbs. In particular, the pattern of [X V₁ Y]—[Y V₂] is
really common in SVCs cross-linguistically (which is what I tried to communicate by quoting all those examples), and usually indicates some sort of cause and effect.
bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 7:46 am
- jau⁵
- have
- jan⁴
- person
- co⁵-laan⁶-zo²
- sit-broken-PERV
- zoung¹
- CL
- dang³
- chair
Someone has broken the chair by sitting on it (Cantonese)
This example works different in Jin because "break" is active while "sit" is stative. That means the active vs stative marking for the referents is reversed between the 2. The new inverse system comes into play here.
…
ak'ijuqawi lazhimbu qam magawa ja tumbuwi
- ak'iju-qa-wi
- break-ACT.DIR-SGT
- lazhi-mbu
- sitting-STA.INV
- qam
- that.which.3P.ACT
- magawa
- is.unknown
- ja
- that.which.3P.STA
- tumbu-wi
- is.chair-the.SGT
Someone broke the chair and was sitting on the chair.
Someone broke the chair by sitting on it.
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I’m… fairly confused about what you’re trying to do here? You seem to be going for a construction like [someone broke the chair]—[someone sat on the chair], which sorta works… except Cantonese does [someone sat on the chair]—[the chair broke], which as far as I can tell would work perfectly in Jin as is.
(I was also going to say that verbs in an SVC can’t differ in their voice status, but I managed to find a handful of counterexamples from Tolaki and Taba, where one verb was active and another was passive or causative. This seemed pretty uncommon, though, which makes sense considering the sorts of things SVCs get used for.)
bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 7:46 am
- Tali
- Tali
- mi-tit
- PER-punch
- ten̄ten̄
- cry.REDUP
- Kevin
- Kevin
Tali made Kevin cry by punching him (Mwotlap)
I'm not sure if "crying" would be active or stative. I'm inclined to say "stative", but it might depend on what the root word is and what/if any affixes are used to form it. Assuming stative, it works like the 1st example where the 2nd verb is stative and a result.
- !cumba-hi
- punch-SGT
- kuyu
- cry
- qam
- that.which.3P.ACT
- Tali
- Tali
- ja
- that.which.3P.STA
- Kawin
- Kevin
Tali punched Kevin and he cried.
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Note that this is about as close as I can get for now. I don't have causative sentences like "X made Y do Z" worked out yet.
I think it would be hard to get any closer, given that this is precisely parallel to the Mwotlap sentence. As I’ve been saying, switch-subject SVCs often have causative interpretations implicitly.
What I was getting at in my original post was that I don't currently have a good way of forming equational, copular sentences where the predicate has multiple words/adjectives/descriptors to define the subject. It works if they are all stative or all active, but not a mix due to the requirements for active vs stative marking of the argument. A voice change doesn't work since there's no way to "flip" the marking of 2 arguments. So the question remains, how should I form sentences like:
The boy that stole fruit is the small one running.
I suspect you’re missing something here, which is that
most languages don’t have a ‘nice’ way to represent these sorts of things. If you look at the English sentence, for example,
running is really a highly reduced relative clause:
the small one running is an NP. (Compare e.g.
the boy is the small one hungrily eating an apple, where the relative clause status is more obvious.) Languages have lots of ways of dealing with these sentences: they usually co-opt other similar constructions, such as participles or converbs, though more rarely they innovate new ones like English
secondary predication. Thinking along these lines, no doubt Jin
will end up using SVCs for these some of the time… but probably not for this sentence, for the reason you mention (as well as others that I mention below). It’s hard to say more about this specific case given that I’m not too familiar with Jin grammar, but I can easily imagine
bucʼad- being turned into a relative clause as in English, or perhaps an adverb instead. Your
haj-construction looks reasonable too.
The reason I described this in terms of "serial verbs" is because of how Jin is structured, or at least how I'm interpreting/analysing that structure. Like the Salishan languages, the line between nouns & verbs is extremely thin & blurry, and there is at least flexibility for words to be either arguments or predicates. I will be taking this a bit further in Jin by having all types of verbal marking allowed on the arguments, including tense/aspect. You'll notice that many of them already have voice suffixes. As a result, take this example:
ja sambiwi sanza
- ja
- that.which.3P.STA
- sambi-wi
- is.boy-the.SGT
- sanza
- is.small
The small boy...
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Because the content words of arguments can be analysed as verbs (which is what I'm doing because it's the easiest & most consistent way I've found), that means those content words of
sambiwi sanza "small boy" can be seen as a serial verb construction. No, it's definitely not (quite?) a serial verb in the typical sense. I'm using the term
very loosely here.
Two things here. Firstly, you will find a
ridiculous amount of disagreement amongst linguists about what, exactly, qualifies as an SVC. It seems that just about every linguist has a different definition, and is willing to fight all of the others to the death about it. (This is the main reason I complain about the literature so much.) In fact, I’ve seen at least one recent book which consciously abandons the term entirely. So most of the time, it’s safe to refer to things as SVCs if they vaguely agree with previous usage.
Secondly, however, what you have here does
not vaguely agree with previous usage. The Jin SVCs you mentioned earlier form a fairly coherent set of constructions, with a certain internal and external structure which can be analysed fairly consistently. Contrast something like
sambiwi sanza, which has a completely different internal structure, very different semantics, and is located in a different position in the sentence. It most certainly cannot ‘be seen as a serial verb construction’ — at least, not without drastically weakening the term.
A few more points. Firstly, it bears emphasising that serial verb constructions are
constructions. To put it another way, they aren’t neutral; an SVC almost never means the same thing as its ‘equivalent’ non-SVC sentence. Each language has its own peculiar patterns specifying which SVCs are natural and which aren’t, and speakers need to choose to use an SVC over other methods of clause combination.
The basic principle behind all this is that, at the most fundamental level, SVCs are used to combine verbs which describe ‘one event’. The most consistent diagnostic features of SVCs follow naturally from this: (a) there is no overt co- or subordination marker, (b) all verbs have the same TAM and negation status, (c) the verbs share arguments in some way, and (d) they are all under one intonation contour. (Almost everyone agrees on at least these conditions, though as I said you will always find some exceptions.)
Syntactically speaking, SVCs are usually rather highly structured: they tend to be closer to verb compounds or affixes than to things like clause coordination. (In fact, if you find yourself translating an SVC using the word ‘and’, it’s worth questioning whether you’re translating it correctly.) Often there are specific patterns for argument sharing and transitivity. As mentioned several times already, [X V₁ Y]—[Y V₂] is particularly common; even more so is [X V₁]—[X V₂], with subject sharing. On the other hand, SVCs just as often are grammaticalised, with one verb undergoing semantic bleaching to become the regular means for marking a particular category.
Finally, I do recommend doing some reading: this is a subtle area, and one which is hard to summarise easily. Since Jin seems to be growing ever closer to Austronesian, I’d recommend starting with ed. Senft’s (open-access!) volume
Serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages. Its theoretical treatment is perhaps a bit simplistic, but the individual language chapters are excellent. Aikhenvald and Dixon’s
Serial Verb Constructions: A Cross-linguistic Typology is also nice if you can get it; it draws from a much broader range of languages for its examples, which again are excellent.
Now that I look at both the current and new systems for the inverse voice, I can see where it could be viewed as an Austronesian symmetrical voice system. Only the inverse and passive voices change with the updated system, so it would have still been Austronesian before. Originally, Jin was conceived as a split-S language, and then I decided I wanted a "passive" voice that was transitive. That's where the direct vs inverse transitive voices come from. If that constitutes "Austronesian", then yeah, I guess it is. Still, it's not quite of the Philippine type. The voices are just several types of "agent" voices and several "patient" ones. It doesn't have the locative, instrumental, or circumstantial voices found in the Philippine langs. See Dwarven for that. 
