Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

It seems to me that many S=O ambitransitive verbs have transitive forms which are simply causatives of their intransitive forms. For instance:

I break it = I make it break
I move it = I make it move
I trip him = I make him trip
etc.

Is this true for all S=O ambitransitive verbs, or are there some verbs for which this relationship does not apply?

[KathTheDragon]

What you've discovered are labile verbs.

[bradrn]

What you've discovered are labile verbs.

Yes, I am well aware of the concept of labile verbs (though I prefer the more transparent term ‘S=O ambitransitive’). What I am asking is: do all such verb pairs have causative/anticausative semantics, or are there S=O verbs with different semantics? (I ask because this seems like a notable asymmetry with S=A ambitransitive verbs, which seem to have no such clear-cut correspondence.)

[Moose-tache]

If the subject of an intransitive verb becomes the object of the transitive version, what are the options beyond a causative relationship?

*evidential: "I break the egg." = "I hear that the egg breaks."
*aspectual: "It breaks the egg." = "The egg has broken completely."
*polar: "They break the egg." = "The egg doesn't break."

A causal relationship seems like one of few possible options that actually have any logical sense. I would be more surprised if there were any significant number of labile verbs with any other relationship to one another.

[KathTheDragon]

Oh, I missed the part where you specified S=O. As far as I know all English examples are causative/anticasuative pairs.

[Moose-tache]

I always assumed "The Right Honorable So-and-So" meant that So-and-So was honorable, and also right, presumably a legal term that had drifted in meaning, like "gentle." It turns out, no, "right" in this case means "very," as in "The Really Quite Honorable So-and-So." This is quite funny to me, because I have always associated adverbial right with lower class dialects ("He were roight cheekeh!").

[Kuchigakatai]

Is this true for all S=O ambitransitive verbs, or are there some verbs for which this relationship does not apply?

What do you think of the following?

He moved. (Did I manage to move him directly with my body, or did he move himself?)
I moved him. (With my hands, or by telling him to move?)
I made him move. (With my hands, or by telling him to move?)

He bathed. (He moved his body to do it.)
I bathed him. (I moved my body to do it.)
I made him bathe. (I told him to move his body to do it.)

He masturbated. (He moved his arms.)
I masturbated him. (I moved my arms to do it.)
I made him masturbate. (I told him to move his arms.)

He stretched out. (He moved and then held his limbs.)
I stretched him out. (I held him with my arms.)
I made him stretch out. (I told him to move and then hold his limbs.)

I think these verbs either can be, or are generally, very voluntary ([+control]), and this produces interesting relationships that are different from that of 'burn' and 'boil', which are by nature much more involuntary. Contrast my first set here of 'to move' against its use with a very inert inanimate, and with 'to burn':

The desk moved. (~It turned out the desk could be moved.)
I moved the desk. (I moved my body to accomplish it.)
I made the desk move. (I moved my body to accomplish it.)

The documents burned.
I burned the documents.
I made the documents burn.



Interestingly, Spanish and Latin have the same ambiguity that English has in mover and movēre 'to move', but again like English they're unambiguous in the verbs for 'bathe, masturbate, stretch (out)' ('masturbate' is not attested well enough in Latin though, but let's just ignore that one...). BTW, Latin sometimes uses a different verb altogether to supply the transitive, but this is lexical and unrelated to the action being voluntary or not:

(Madēre/ardēre = intransitive 'get wet'/'burn', madefacere/ūrere = transitive 'wet'/'burn')
Madet. Ardet. ('It gets wet / burns.')
Id madefaciō. Id ūrō. ('I get it wet / burn it.')
Cōgō id madēre. Cōgō id ardēre. ('I make it get wet / burn.')

(Intransitive 'bathe'/'break' are lavāre/frangere in the mediopassive voice, while transitive 'bathe'/'break' are in the active voice.)
Lavātur. Frangitur. ('He bathes / It breaks')
Eum lavō. Id frangō. ('I bathe him / I break it')
Cōgō eum lavārī. Cōgō id frangī. ('I make him bathe / I make it break')

[bradrn]

Well, yes, of course there is a difference: generally ‘I X it’ has more direct and immediate causation than ‘I make it X’. But the relation is still fundamentally one of causation.

[Kuchigakatai]

Someone here years ago (it may have been Qwynegold but I'm not sure) asked whether there were any attestations of a language ending up with a pair of phonemes having the opposite values of an earlier stage, say, l > n and n > l. This is not really an example of it, but I was reminded of that old question when I noticed this.

Proto-Semitic's coronal fricatives merged in different ways in different languages. When it comes to Hebrew vs. Arabic, we see:
PS *s [(t)s]
> Hebrew ס‎ s /s/
> Arabic س‎ s /s/
PS *š [ʃ] (or perhaps [s] if *s was always [ts])
> Hebrew שׁ š /ʃ/
> Arabic س s /s/ as well
PS *ś [(t)ɬ]
> Hebrew שׂ ś /ɬ/ (a phoneme also fed with PS *ṯ [θ], which remained distinct in Classical Arabic)
> Arabic ش š /ʃ/

Now, Hebrew שׂ ś /ɬ/ later came to be widely pronounced /s/, that is, the same as ס‎ s /s/. This has an interesting effect:
- PS *ś becomes שׂ /s/ in modern Hebrew, and ش /ʃ/ in Arabic
- PS *š becomes שׁ /ʃ/ in ancient and modern Hebrew, and س /s/ in Arabic
...so effectively the two Proto-Semitic phonemes have the opposite descendants.

This is, then, the reason why you see things like the following between modern Hebrew and Arabic:
- Hebrew עשב (ʕ)ésev 'grass', Arabic عشب ʕušb 'grass'
- Hebrew לשון‎ lašón 'tongue', Arabic لسان‎ lisaan 'tongue'

And, more famously, Hebrew שלום‎ šalóm and Arabic سلام‎ salaam.

[Pabappa]

Western and Eastern Armenian dialects often have opposite voicing on stops: e.g. word pairs like vardapet ~ vartabed and name pairs like Hagopian and Hakobian. This is not a simple swap, but rather two different results of an original three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated, filtered through a Romanization scheme that doesn't represent aspiration in the one dialect that preserves it. It would seem that Armenian does not represent these dialectal differences in the spelling, so the letters that are /b d g/ to one group are /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ to another.

[WeepingElf]

Western and Eastern Armenian dialects often have opposite voicing on stops: e.g. word pairs like vardapet ~ vartabed and name pairs like Hagopian and Hakobian. This is not a simple swap, but rather two different results of an original three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated, filtered through a Romanization scheme that doesn't represent aspiration in the one dialect that preserves it. It would seem that Armenian does not represent these dialectal differences in the spelling, so the letters that are /b d g/ to one group are /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ to another.

Don't forget that these spellings are just popular romanizations, which have nothing to do with how the Armenians themselves spell their language in their own alphabet! As far as I know, Old Armenian had plain voiceless, aspirated and voiced (probably, actually breathy-voiced) stops and affricates, and the Armenian orthography represents these distinctions. While Eastern Armenian preserved this, Western Armenian underwent a merger of the aspirated and voiced stops (which is a good reason to assume that the latter were breathy-voiced) as aspirated stops; then it underwent a voicing onset time shift such that the plain voiceless stops became voiced. I don't know, though, how Western Armenian is spelled natively; AFAIK, they use an etymological spelling showing what the stops had been like in Old Armenian.

[Qwynegold]

Someone here years ago (it may have been Qwynegold but I'm not sure) asked whether there were any attestations of a language ending up with a pair of phonemes having the opposite values of an earlier stage, say, l > n and n > l.

Hmm, I don't think it was me. Or was it?

[Kuchigakatai]

I counted the syllables shown in Wikipedia's Pinyin table article: 417 possible syllables in total.* This is pretty interesting because if you multiply that times 4 or 5 tones, you get 1668 or 2065 syllables. I've sometimes come across a claim that Mandarin dictionaries list words using about ~1300 syllable+tone combinations, which would mean dictionaries include entries using about 78% or 62% of all possible syllable+tone combinations (depending on whether the "~1300" count doesn't include neutral tones, or does).



* I skipped the syllables "fiao", claimed in the table for a single word borrowed from Wu Chinese equivalent to Mandarin 勿要 wúyào, and "ê", which seems to be a non-standard pinyin spelling for [ʔe] (used only in interjections) to distinguish that syllable from (standard) "e" [ʔɤ] (which is used in content words too, e.g. 䳘 é 'goose', 餓 è '(to be) hungry'). I notice that there is an empty row for "iai", which suggests the Taiwanese Mandarin syllable "yai" (attested in only a couple words, as a variant pronunciation of what is otherwise ya or ai) was included there at one point but then improperly deleted. The empty row "io" is likely the remnant of some old user's mistake.

However, I did include the various syllables with the "[​table 2]" note, as they seem like reasonable additions to the common inventory of syllables, involving some fairly well-known recent words or borrowings; if these are removed, the count is brought down to 410 possible syllables. I don't ultimately really know whether "fiao" is reasonable after all; and so, if you include "ê" and "fiao", you get 420 possible syllables.

Hmm, I don't think it was me. Or was it?

Who knows, I said I'm not sure.

[Linguoboy]

I counted the syllables shown in Wikipedia's Pinyin table article: 417 possible syllables in total.* This is pretty interesting because if you multiply that times 4 or 5 tones, you get 1668 or 2065 syllables. I've sometimes come across a claim that Mandarin dictionaries list words using about ~1300 syllable+tone combinations, which would mean dictionaries include entries using about 78% or 62% of all possible syllable+tone combinations (depending on whether the "~1300" count doesn't include neutral tones, or does).

I remember in my younger days counting up all the entries, doing the same calculation, and getting a similar ratio. Some gaps are on their way to being filled (e.g. the rhyme /ei/ with the dental series due to innovations/dialect borrowings like 嘚 and 忒) but many will probably never be.

What's the ratio for English, do you suppose? I notice a lot of gaps when I'm looking for examples but I've never tried recording them systematically.

[Travis B.]

What's the ratio for English, do you suppose? I notice a lot of gaps when I'm looking for examples but I've never tried recording them systematically.

E.g. how many words have the rhyme -/eɪŋkθs/?

[Qwynegold]

I counted the syllables shown in Wikipedia's Pinyin table article: 417 possible syllables in total.* This is pretty interesting because if you multiply that times 4 or 5 tones, you get 1668 or 2065 syllables. I've sometimes come across a claim that Mandarin dictionaries list words using about ~1300 syllable+tone combinations, which would mean dictionaries include entries using about 78% or 62% of all possible syllable+tone combinations (depending on whether the "~1300" count doesn't include neutral tones, or does).

I have a printed syllable table. I counted 408 different syllables on that one.

[Kuchigakatai]

I have a printed syllable table. I counted 408 different syllables on that one.

Yeah, different tables include different syllables. I imagine yours has 408 because it doesn't include ê, fiao, all or most of the ones marked with the "[​table 2]" note in the link, and either zhei or dei or both.

I remember in my younger days counting up all the entries, doing the same calculation, and getting a similar ratio. Some gaps are on their way to being filled (e.g. the rhyme /ei/ with the dental series due to innovations/dialect borrowings like 嘚 and 忒) but many will probably never be.

What's the ratio for English, do you suppose? I notice a lot of gaps when I'm looking for examples but I've never tried recording them systematically.

Now that you mention it, Wikipedia's table there doesn't include "tei" as in 忒! No idea about the English ratio.

EDIT: A follow-up, months later.

[Kuchigakatai]

From a post I made in February last year (2019):

People know the Swahili morphological reinterpretation of Arabic كتاب kitaabun as kitabu, plural vitabu. Here are some other examples...

Arabic وقت waqt 'time (as an abstraction); moment' got reinterpreted as having the gender of long or wide things [class: singular 11 / plural 10]: wakati, plural nyakati.

Arabic مدرسة madrasa 'school' got reinterpreted as a ma-plural (in the gender of augmentatives or things that often appear in groups) [class 5/6]: madarasa 'classes, classrooms', singular darasa 'class, classroom'.

Arabic أسقف usqufun '(Christian) bishop' (from Greek ἐπίσκοπος) also got assigned the gender of augmentatives or things that often appear in groups [class 5/6]: askofu, plural maaskofu.

Arabic agent nouns begin with mu-, which is convenient for Swahili speakers because the animate gender marker is word-initial m-, so you get معلم muʕallimun 'teacher' reinterpreted as mwalimu, plural walimu [class 1/2].

English "wire" got reinterpreted as having the w-/u- prefix of the class for long or wide things, and became singular waya, plural nyaya [class 11/10].

English "willow" was adapted by changing w- to mw-, the prefix of plant names m(w)-, and became singular mwilo, plural miilo [class 3/4]. Interestingly, there's also an Arabic borrowing from the same tree, msafasafi plural misafsafi, from صفصاف‎ sˤafsˤaaf 'willow', to which the tree prefixes of class 3/4 were simply added.

Arabic مشاهرة‎ muʃaahara '(monthly) wage' was adapted with the prefix m(w)-, perhaps due to being associated with time (cf. mwaka 'year' plural myaka), becoming mshahara mishahara [class 3/4].

[Travis B.]

I noticed from listening to my mother that she has a sigificantly centralized or even backed allophone of /ɛ/ before /l/, namely [ɜ] or even [ʌ], even though she usually has a more front realization of /ɛ/ than I do.

[Nachtswalbe]

I learned in my variationist class that expectations of gender/race/nationality can actually distort auditory processing e.g a stuffed koala and a kiwi can influence perception of /fIS &nd tSIps/ as /fiS &nd tSips/.