Zompist Bboard Again

Zju wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:03 pm What I don't understand is how exactly are Chinese rhymes and "classical phonemes" different? What is it that one of them has and the other lacks? As far as this scheme is concerned, tiān is two phonemes and a tone, so phonemicity is well-defined.

Another question: say that you're making tables of a language's paradigms, e.g.:

NOM -ok
ACC -en
GEN -in
LOC -ut

But then you stumble upon a noun class that doesn't mark its nominative and doesn't have a locative. How would you denote that, if you had to have a row for the locative? (sorry for the contrived example, the question is for the general case).

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:33 am It is possible to map the rhymes into phonemes of vowel nucleus and consonants, but the rhymes have such complementary distributions and allophony that it is pretty ambiguous how to go about it.

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 5:26 pm

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 10:33 am It is possible to map the rhymes into phonemes of vowel nucleus and consonants, but the rhymes have such complementary distributions and allophony that it is pretty ambiguous how to go about it.

There is no necessity for there to be a single correct analysis. It is entirely conceivable that different speakers are working with different analyses. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that all instances of allophones are recognised as such, and some speakers may even phonemicise what are generally recognised as allophonic differences.

Zju wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:47 pm Yes, it has obvious constituent parts in its realisation, but we don't analyse English /eɪ/ as two phonemes, do we?

Mid-Atlantic English with TRAP-BATH split
i  ɚ  u
eə    oə
ɛ     ʌ
æ     ɑ

Romanian
i  ɨ u
e  ə o
ea a oa

Chechen
i  y  u
ie yø uo
e  ø  o
æ     ɑ

Adzera
i  u
ai au
  a
  
Chong (simplified, ignoring phonation and length)
i  ɤ  u 
iə ɤə uə
e  ə  o 
ɛ  ʌ  ɔ   
ai a  ao      

Aneme Wake (and many other languages)
i u
e o  ei    oi  eu    ou
 a      ai        au	

Fasu
i u
e o
 a   ae  ao  ai  au

Gizrra
i ɨ u
e ə o
  a
ae ao ai aɨ au
əe
ɨe    ɨi
      ui

Iau
i ɨ u
ɪ   ʊ
e   o
  a
ae aɪ aʊ ai aɨ au
         ei
oe       oi
   ʊɪ
         ui
aʊɪ aui

Nortaneous wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 7:43 pm

Zju wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:47 pm Yes, it has obvious constituent parts in its realisation, but we don't analyse English /eɪ/ as two phonemes, do we?

Well, some people don't. But even aside from American /ej/, I've seen plenty of analyses that take diphthongs as two phonemes packed into one nucleus, usually for Austronesian and Papuan languages that have a lot of diphthongs.

But is "diphthong" a single pattern? Sometimes diphthongs fill slots in the vowel grid:

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 5:26 pmThere is no necessity for there to be a single correct analysis. It is entirely conceivable that different speakers are working with different analyses. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that all instances of allophones are recognised as such, and some speakers may even phonemicise what are generally recognised as allophonic differences.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:35 amHave you read "the blue bird of ergativity"? You will find it on google and IMHO it adresses the issue quite clearly.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:26 am Do you guys know of languages with a fairly pure ergative-absolutive alignment? As in, maybe they have another alignment too, but it's used only in a peculiar minor situation or two like purpose clauses when done with a specific subordinator, or something.

I was also just thinking that the various nominative-accusative languages whose grammars I'm familiar with are also split-accusative...
- English and French have direct alignment in action nouns ("the firing of the CEO" <- did the CEO fire someone, or was s/he fired?)

- Spanish has it quite a bit with inanimates in both regular finite clauses (via fronting with focus) and infinitive clauses ("al acabar la tarea" <- did the task end, or was the task finished?, cf. al acabar mi amigo la tarea 'right after my friend finished the task') besides also action nouns

- Standard Arabic has it in verbal nouns too (ʔaklu l-kalbi <- did the dog eat something or did someone eat the dog?), which is more notable than English and French as they're used a bit more often, in more constructions

- Mandarin also gets in this list with its ambiguous use of topicalization of direct objects—a classic example in Chinese linguistics is 魚還沒吃啊 yú hái méi chī a = 'the fish haven't eaten [food] yet' ~ 'you/someone/we/etc. haven't eaten the fish yet', and verbs inside relative clauses can present some ambiguity about their arguments

I'm starting to feel the term split-X is only useful when a major sentence type involves another alignment, like all finite clauses in the past having another alignment. There might not be languages with a pure use of alignments...

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:35 am Have you read "the blue bird of ergativity"? You will find it on google and IMHO it adresses the issue quite clearly.

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 6:38 pm Most languages have funny things going on with nominalisations, so I’m not sure it’s useful to call case-marking in nominalisations ‘split’. (Though English does have a split system, in the form of direct marking for nouns vs accusative for pronouns.)

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 6:38 pmThat being said, I’m not entirely sure your examples are actually split systems in the same way that, say, Dyirbal and Tibetan are. Firstly, action nouns are really something which takes place within the NP — they’ll always be somewhat different to case-marking and other morphology. Most languages have funny things going on with nominalisations, so I’m not sure it’s useful to call case-marking in nominalisations ‘split’. (Though English does have a split system, in the form of direct marking for nouns vs accusative for pronouns.)

Richard W wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:14 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 6:38 pm Most languages have funny things going on with nominalisations, so I’m not sure it’s useful to call case-marking in nominalisations ‘split’. (Though English does have a split system, in the form of direct marking for nouns vs accusative for pronouns.)

Would you please dejargonise that. It doesn't look right, but I can't be sure until I understand it.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:28 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 6:38 pmThat being said, I’m not entirely sure your examples are actually split systems in the same way that, say, Dyirbal and Tibetan are. Firstly, action nouns are really something which takes place within the NP — they’ll always be somewhat different to case-marking and other morphology. Most languages have funny things going on with nominalisations, so I’m not sure it’s useful to call case-marking in nominalisations ‘split’. (Though English does have a split system, in the form of direct marking for nouns vs accusative for pronouns.)

I feel you're getting tricked/confused by the terminology there though. English also has a nominative-accusative system in nouns. The definitions of morphosyntactic alignments involve syntax too, they're not just about morphology: …

• Verbal agreement is accusative for 3SG, direct/absent for everything else (which interestingly violates the animacy hierarchy!)
• Case-marking is accusative for pronouns, direct/absent for everything else
• Word order is consistently accusative.

Similarly, in action nouns you could have S=A but not =O, in the way things are marked via word order or prepositions or cases or marking within the action noun, etc. But English/French/Spanish/Arabic instead have ambiguous marking, where S=A=O ("the firing of the CEO").

Salmoneus once proposed a conlang idea I found very amusing, with a direct-inverse alignment accomplished purely via syntax, by requiring uninflected auxiliary verbs when this or that happened in the animacy hierarchy...

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pmThis is why it’s useful to carefully separate the various areas where morphosyntactic alignment can appear! Specifically, for English:

• Verbal agreement is accusative for 3SG, direct/absent for everything else (which interestingly violates the animacy hierarchy!)
• Case-marking is accusative for pronouns, direct/absent for everything else
• Word order is consistently accusative.

Of course, in English, everything turns out either accusative or direct, and everything is accusative at least in word order, but it’s interesting to note that the conditioning environment changes depending on the area, and of course there are many languages with completely different alignments in each place. (So for instance, you get ones like Komnzo, with active-stative agreement, ergative case-marking, and neutral word order.)

It gets weirder! Movima has direct-inverse word order. Not only that, it’s fully syntactically direct-inverse as well — so, for instance, you can relativise on the intransitive subject, or on the less animate transitive argument, but not on the more animate transitive argument.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 8:08 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pmThis is why it’s useful to carefully separate the various areas where morphosyntactic alignment can appear! Specifically, for English:

• Verbal agreement is accusative for 3SG, direct/absent for everything else (which interestingly violates the animacy hierarchy!)
• Case-marking is accusative for pronouns, direct/absent for everything else
• Word order is consistently accusative.

Of course, in English, everything turns out either accusative or direct, and everything is accusative at least in word order, but it’s interesting to note that the conditioning environment changes depending on the area, and of course there are many languages with completely different alignments in each place. (So for instance, you get ones like Komnzo, with active-stative agreement, ergative case-marking, and neutral word order.)

That seems nice and fair, and it's definitely interesting, but AFAIK your use of the jargon is also non-standard? I thought that if any of those distinctions was present, to distinguish A from O, aligning the former with S, this would mean saying e.g. "English has ... direct marking for nouns" would be unusual (or confusing/confused use of the terminology). My point in that post was to direct attention away from morphological case marking.

It gets weirder! Movima has direct-inverse word order. Not only that, it’s fully syntactically direct-inverse as well — so, for instance, you can relativise on the intransitive subject, or on the less animate transitive argument, but not on the more animate transitive argument.

Beautiful!

I sometimes think of transitive subjects (A, which is typically animate) as "less core" than transitive objects (O). Something to do with where focus usually falls in when a transitive verb is used (I have the intuitive feeling "the princess ate the apple" would typically have more focus on the apple, even though both NPs are definite), also, all the common basic word orders are subject->object: SVO, SOV, VSO... which I feel says something about the statistical importance of O. A language that is not comfortable relativizing the more animate transitive argument sounds very interesting for the same reason. Hmm...

Also, heh, have you seen the phrase "to relativize on [a constituent]" before? I used to say that all the time, but people here (esp. Salmoneus) complained it was inappropriate...... I think people told me to just say "to relativize [a constituent]".

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pm Verbal agreement[/b] is accusative for 3SG, direct/absent for everything else (which interestingly violates the animacy hierarchy!)

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pm Case-marking[/b] is accusative for pronouns, direct/absent for everything else

Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 7:10 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pm Verbal agreement[/b] is accusative for 3SG, direct/absent for everything else (which interestingly violates the animacy hierarchy!)

So We drink water shows accusative verbal agreement, but We eat peas has direct or absent verbal agreement?

bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:47 pm Case-marking[/b] is accusative for pronouns, direct/absent for everything else

Except that English is marked nominative; who is the only pronoun for which the nominative seems to be the marked form, and many speakers lack whom.

• I was him in that play
• I was tired and
• If that be true...

Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 7:46 am And what about

• I was him in that play
• I was tired and
• If that be true...

?

• Unlike all other verbs, the copula exhibits agreement with the number of the subject (counting you as a plural), as well as a special form for first person singular.
• Case-marking becomes a bit wonky as well: the subject is consistently in the nominative, but the object can be either nominative or accusative depending on how learnèd you want to be. (IIRC Dixon has noted that the copula taking a nominative subject and accusative object is a characteristic of marked-nominative languages.)