One possibility is that [ʋ̃] either turns into [m] or, well [ʋ], as it's originally a fricative.akam chinjir wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 3:05 amOkay, I can see how that would work, but I actually like [w̃] and would prefer to keep it, my worry is about [ʋ̃].
So don't. "Polypersonal agreement" doesn't mean you can't have intransitive verbs!bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 4:36 pm What would happen with copulae with adjectival predicates in a language with polypersonal agreement? For instance, if I were to say something like 'My house is big', how would 'is' be inflected? 'Big' isn't even a noun, so it could be difficult to apply personal agreement.
I know. But in this case, 'is' is intransitive (EDIT: I meant transitive)! Besides, how would you have an intransitive copula?Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 5:55 pmSo don't. "Polypersonal agreement" doesn't mean you can't have intransitive verbs!bradrn wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 4:36 pm What would happen with copulae with adjectival predicates in a language with polypersonal agreement? For instance, if I were to say something like 'My house is big', how would 'is' be inflected? 'Big' isn't even a noun, so it could be difficult to apply personal agreement.
I know this as well. I was asking in the specific case of a transitive copula with adjectival predicate in a polypersonal language.Nor need there be a copula in any case.
If you really want to force it, adjectives are often treated as substantives themselves anyway, so they can be declined either to agree with their noun or otherwise.
I'm not entirely sure how adjectival declension relates to polypersonal agreement on verbs. Anyway, this is the one case where an adjective is not directly applied to a noun!
No one requires you to make the adjectival copula the same as noun copula. You can make a copula in "I am apple" and "Ï am happy" different. So the former copula is transitive and the latter is intransitive. (Usually adjectival copula comes from "exist Adj-ly" construction. Like japanese: "kore wa oishii da" < "kore wa oishii de aru", so it will never receive pronomial affix)bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:32 amI'm not entirely sure how adjectival declension relates to polypersonal agreement on verbs. Anyway, this is the one case where an adjective is not directly applied to a noun!
In general, it seems there's been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly what I've been asking. So let me elaborate: Assume that we have an agglutinative language with polypersonal agreement and a transitive copula. Translating something like, for instance, 'I am an apple' (however odd this sentence may be) is straightforward: you do something like I am-1s>3s apple. However, it's trickier translating something like 'I am happy': it's clearly going to be something along the lines of I am-1s>(something) happy, but what do you do for the (something)?
I already have multiple copulae, so this would be the best solution for me. However, I still don't really understand how an intransitive copula could work.Akangka wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:06 amNo one requires you to make the adjectival copula the same as noun copula. You can make a copula in "I am apple" and "Ï am happy" different. So the former copula is transitive and the latter is intransitive.bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:32 amI'm not entirely sure how adjectival declension relates to polypersonal agreement on verbs. Anyway, this is the one case where an adjective is not directly applied to a noun!
In general, it seems there's been quite a bit of confusion as to exactly what I've been asking. So let me elaborate: Assume that we have an agglutinative language with polypersonal agreement and a transitive copula. Translating something like, for instance, 'I am an apple' (however odd this sentence may be) is straightforward: you do something like I am-1s>3s apple. However, it's trickier translating something like 'I am happy': it's clearly going to be something along the lines of I am-1s>(something) happy, but what do you do for the (something)?
Unfortunately, I don't speak Japanese. Could you provide a gloss?(Usually adjectival copula comes from "exist Adj-ly" construction. Like japanese: "kore wa oishii da" < "kore wa oishii de aru", so it will never receive pronomial affix)
Do you know of any languages that do that? You could look into what they do, if there are any.
I believe Swahili does this in non-present tenses - in the present tense, there's no personal agreement. However, it's proved to be a bit hard to find examples: it can't be in the past or future tense, and have an adjectival predicate. It doesn't help that most of the Swahili 'grammars' in the Grammar Pile aren't actually reference grammars but rather unhelpful books along the lines of 'How to Learn Swahili'.akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:55 amDo you know of any languages that do that? You could look into what they do, if there are any.
I believe that many North American languages do this - instead of adjectives, they use verbs such as be.happy etc. I'm not an expert on the topic though.(My amateur brain thinks about this sort of thing in quite a different way. Like, in "I am happy," the predicate is just "happy," but the copula gets inserted because "happy" can't take subject agreement and tense, a bit as if be+happy ends up used as a two-part verb; obviously it has no separate object that it could agree with.)
What I mean is adjectives can be treated as nouns (and hence can be inflected as if they are nouns):bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:32 amI'm not entirely sure how adjectival declension relates to polypersonal agreement on verbs. Anyway, this is the one case where an adjective is not directly applied to a noun!
So what you're saying here is that copulae are semantically intransitive (since they only act on one argument), but syntactically transitive (since they require two arguments anyway). This is certainly a useful way of looking at things, but I'm not entirely sure how it helps in my case.Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 7:40 am I think it's important to point out that you're actually asking about an intransitive copula, not a transitive one. In "I am happy", the copula is intransitive, as it has (neither semantically nor syntactically) an object/patient. If you're treating it as transitive, by definition you're treating what follows as nominal, so it follows the same rules as 'apple' or 'blancmange'.
Of course, semantically all copulae are intransitive - they do not refer to events in which an agent acts upon a patient (if I say 'dogs are mammals', I'm not saying the dogs are doing something to the mammals, or that the mammals are changed as a result). However, the copulae used in nominal equatives are naturally syntactically bivalent, and in some languages do pattern syntactically like transitive verbs (although they're not transitive, and they're not verbs). Or they can be like transitive verbs but different - the 'object' is often in the nominative, as it was until recently in English (c.f. the telephone-answering idiom "this is she", and the melodrammatic idiom "it is I!") If you want, you can treat adjectival predicates like nomative equatives - "I am a red one" for "I am red". But you don't have to.
I think that we're going around in circles now - this is exactly what I want to do in the first place! The question is though: how does one treat these situations in the same way? As I've already said, I use personal agreement, and adjectives don't have a person.So I think the question is confused. If you're treating adjectival copulae as though they were transitives with nominal objects... well, then you treat them the same way you treat transitives with nominal objects.
This is probably the most helpful insight in my case, but I'm still quite confused. Does this mean that I have to do something like 'I am-1s apple'? That would be really weird, since the verb is conjugated as if it were intransitive, but it still takes two objects.Incidentally, I think it's really weird to mark the subject and object of an equative copula with different persons. "me-I am the he-apple"? If you are the apple, then the apple is 1st person, so it's weird to mark it as 3rd person for no apparent reason, unless I guess it's really strongly established as a third-person in the conversation until this moment of revelation ("for I am she!"). Do you do this with, for example, job titles? "I am a third-person-doctor?"
No, what I'm saying is that copulae are semantically intransitive, but in some cases may be treated like transitive verbs syntactically.bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:57 pm So what you're saying here is that copulae are semantically intransitive (since they only act on one argument), but syntactically transitive (since they require two arguments anyway). This is certainly a useful way of looking at things, but I'm not entirely sure how it helps in my case.
Well, many languages treat 'become' as a copula, or an inflected form of a copula (it's just a copula with inchoative aspect). "See" is a little different. It is indeed intransitive semantically, and as a result many languages do treat it differently from an ordinary transitive verb - some use an intransitive verb, others use a transitive with special case marking on either the subject or the 'object', and I think some even reverse the subject/object assignment relative to English. However, "see" is much more transitive, on the transitivity hierarchy, than a copula, so more likely to be treated more like a transitive. For a start, "see" takes arguments referring to (other than in a reflexive voice) two things, whereas the copula takes two arguments referring to the same thing (it's in a way semantically inherently reflexive and can never be truly active).(Also, you have the same problem with other words with copulative meanings, such as 'become' - or even words such as 'see' - so this problem is hardly exclusive to the copula.)
Well, no words have person, other than pronouns. Personhood is indexical - it's a property not of the categorical reference of the word (I don't know the linguistic name for this - the quiddity of the reference, is what I mean), but of the haecceity of the referent relative to the perspective of the speech act. You can't take two nouns, like "the doctor" and "the footballer", and tell from the noun what 'person' they are - is a doctor inherently third-person, or is a footballer inherently second-person? Of course not - the noun doesn't have person, the referent has person, relative to a speech act. That guy is third person, regardless of what word I use to refer to him, and you are second person, relative to this speech act, regardless of what word I use to refer to you.I think that we're going around in circles now - this is exactly what I want to do in the first place! The question is though: how does one treat these situations in the same way? As I've already said, I use personal agreement, and adjectives don't have a person.So I think the question is confused. If you're treating adjectival copulae as though they were transitives with nominal objects... well, then you treat them the same way you treat transitives with nominal objects.
I don't know what you "have" to do. Do what you like.This is probably the most helpful insight in my case, but I'm still quite confused. Does this mean that I have to do something like 'I am-1s apple'? That would be really weird, since the verb is conjugated as if it were intransitive, but it still takes two objects.Incidentally, I think it's really weird to mark the subject and object of an equative copula with different persons. "me-I am the he-apple"? If you are the apple, then the apple is 1st person, so it's weird to mark it as 3rd person for no apparent reason, unless I guess it's really strongly established as a third-person in the conversation until this moment of revelation ("for I am she!"). Do you do this with, for example, job titles? "I am a third-person-doctor?"
This transitivity hierarchy sounds interesting. Do you know of any resources where I can learn about it?
That would indeed be ideal. I've tried to look it up myself, but unfortunately information seems to be scarce: so far I've only managed to find out about the Swahili copula, which seems to be marked only for the subject.However, I know nothing about how languages with polypersonal agreement and copulas that pattern identically to transitive verbs deal with nominal predication where the subject is a 1st person participant. So you'd have to ask someone else what actually happens.
I think the linguistic way of saying this is that personhood is pragmatic, not semantic. It relates to the context of the utterance, not to the meaning of any of the words.Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:47 pmWell, no words have person, other than pronouns. Personhood is indexical - it's a property not of the categorical reference of the word (I don't know the linguistic name for this - the quiddity of the reference, is what I mean), but of the haecceity of the referent relative to the perspective of the speech act. You can't take two nouns, like "the doctor" and "the footballer", and tell from the noun what 'person' they are - is a doctor inherently third-person, or is a footballer inherently second-person? Of course not - the noun doesn't have person, the referent has person, relative to a speech act. That guy is third person, regardless of what word I use to refer to him, and you are second person, relative to this speech act, regardless of what word I use to refer to you.
Thanks for mentioning Quechua! For some reason I completely forgot it when I tried to look up examples of copulae in polypersonal languages. Once I looked up the language, I finally did manage to find an example with adjectival predicates:zompist wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 9:43 pmI think the linguistic way of saying this is that personhood is pragmatic, not semantic. It relates to the context of the utterance, not to the meaning of any of the words.Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:47 pmWell, no words have person, other than pronouns. Personhood is indexical - it's a property not of the categorical reference of the word (I don't know the linguistic name for this - the quiddity of the reference, is what I mean), but of the haecceity of the referent relative to the perspective of the speech act. You can't take two nouns, like "the doctor" and "the footballer", and tell from the noun what 'person' they are - is a doctor inherently third-person, or is a footballer inherently second-person? Of course not - the noun doesn't have person, the referent has person, relative to a speech act. That guy is third person, regardless of what word I use to refer to him, and you are second person, relative to this speech act, regardless of what word I use to refer to you.
As for polypersonal languages and copulas... I just have one data point, from Quechua: the predicate is not treated as an accusative. Cf:
Mansana kani.
apple be-1s
I am an apple
Mansanata mikuchkani.
apple-acc eat-past-1s
I ate an apple.
However, the polypersonal suffixes in Quechua basically don't include 3rd person objects. I guess you could address the apple directly:
Mansana, mikuyki.
apple / eat-1>2
Apple, I eat you!
I have no idea if you can say
Mansana, kayki.
apple / be-1>2
Apple, I am you!
I suspect not, because the accusative -ta generally corresponds to the use of the polypersonal suffixes. If I can get hold of an informant, I'll ask...
(warning if anyone cares: I didn't include evidential and topic suffixes because I'm not sure they colloquially apply here.)