Zompist Bboard Again

Posted: **Sat Jul 25, 2020 7:39 pm**

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 12:22 pm Fun thing: a few months ago I had a small argument/discussion with zompist because he also holds this idea that a language can be said to have object agreement if object pronouns (nearly) always appear to replace an absent NP. And of course, we were discussing French. …

Trask and Millar’s Historical Linguistics (which I’m reading now) has an interesting example: Jean, il l’a achetée, la bagnole. Now, I don’t know French, but to me this certainly looks like an example of polypersonal agreement.

While I agree that in Mandarin and Cantonese it's more likely due to pronouncing most syllables with basically equal stress (aside from a few grammatical function words/affixes and the noun-marking suffixes of Mandarin), I wonder if there isn't some truth to what bradrn said. Japanese has simple phonotactics and yet it has heavily-stressed personal pronouns (part of what makes them noun-like, regarding the other thread). Does anyone know what typically happens in Polynesian and Bantu languages? It wouldn't surprise me if in both families pronouns tend to be fully stressed too (not counting the polypersonal agreement prefixes of Bantu verbs).

Don’t know about Polynesian, but Oceanic languages in general have lots of pronominal clitics, which essentially act as reduced pronouns. The subject clitics have gone a bit further and are basically agremeent markers now, but the object clitics still act as reduced pronouns. An example from NE Ambae:

Langi: wind

mo: REAL

here-gi=eu: blow-APPL=1s.O

Langi: wind

mo: REAL

here-gi: blow-APPL

i: PERS

neu: 1s

*Langi: wind

mo: REAL

here-gi=eu: blow-APPL=1s.O

i: PERS

neu: 1s

The wind was blowing on me.

Posted: **Sun Jul 26, 2020 12:34 am**

Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 7:16 pm
Ser wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 12:22 pm I'd say genitive -'s -s' still counts as a case marker...
Why not as a postposition, though? It can even appear on a verb, typically one at the end of a relative clause. A noun phrase composed of a pronoun is the only clear exception, though coordinate noun phrases (e.g. 'you and me') are near the boundaries of native speakers' competences.

"Postposition" seems right, but that doesn't mean it's not a case-marker. (Not that I have any very clear idea when you do and when you don't think of a postposition as also a case marker.)

So English has (at least?) two postpositions, "'s" and "ago."

Posted: **Sun Jul 26, 2020 12:39 am**

bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 7:39 pm Trask and Millar’s Historical Linguistics (which I’m reading now) has an interesting example: Jean, il l’a achetée, la bagnole. Now, I don’t know French, but to me this certainly looks like an example of polypersonal agreement.

Note the commas, though; you can sort of get away with the same thing in English: "As for Jean, he ate it, the baguette." (Er, that's how I read it, must be hungry.) The overt arguments are somehow adjoined to the clause, it's not obviously agreement or clitic doubling or anything like that.

(There's an analysis of some so-called polysynthetic languages where NP arguments are always adjoined like this, so polypersonal agreement ends up not really being agreement, more a kind of incorporation. I think that view has fallen out of favour, though I don't know why.)

Posted: **Sun Jul 26, 2020 12:45 am**

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Jul 26, 2020 12:39 am
bradrn wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 7:39 pm Trask and Millar’s Historical Linguistics (which I’m reading now) has an interesting example: Jean, il l’a achetée, la bagnole. Now, I don’t know French, but to me this certainly looks like an example of polypersonal agreement.
Note the commas, though; you can sort of get away with the same thing in English: "As for Jean, he ate it, the baguette." (Er, that's how I read it, must be hungry.) The overt arguments are somehow adjoined to the clause, it's not obviously agreement or clitic doubling or anything like that.

This is true. As for that English example, I don’t think that’s totally acceptable for me, although you could get away with it if the object is clearly marked as an afterthought: ‘As for Jean, he ate it. —The baguette, that is.’

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 7:18 am**

The interesting thing about French is that that sort of construction is very common.
Is it an example of object marking? I don't think there's really a good answer to that question.
Phonologically, je l'ai achetée is a single word.
But you can and we do say often j'ai acheté la bagnole, j'ai pris la voiture, with object marking etc.
But these still carry only one phrase stress on the last syllable ! If French was an Iroquoian language, we'd describe that as noun incorporation.
You think that's far-fetched? But as it happens, I can't add material between pris and la voiture.
*J'ai pris hier la voiture while I can say Je l'ai prise hier, la voiture.
So except for an orthography that's eight centuries out of date, j'ai pris la voiture is a single word.

All in all, though, if I had to fill a WALS survey, I'd err on the conservative side and say that French doesn't have object marking. Or noun incorporation. The formal register doesn't use those constructions much, there are plenty of cases where we drop object pronouns even in informal speech, the pronouns can still work as independant words, after a fashion...
All in all, I'd say French is undeniably SAE -- it is in fact, one of those languages that define SAE, and yet sometimes uses features we think of as very un-European. A good example of why we shouldn't take linguistic categories too seriously

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:24 am**

Can you say Je prends souvent la voiture?

Posted: **Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:29 am**

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:24 am Can you say Je prends souvent la voiture?

Ah, yes, good catch! Yes, I can. So, sorry, I can actually add material between V and O.

Posted: **Wed Jul 29, 2020 12:25 pm**

Leima got 23/80

Although it's not exactly the most naturalistic conlang out there

Posted: **Thu Jul 30, 2020 4:32 am**

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:29 am
akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:24 am Can you say Je prends souvent la voiture?
Ah, yes, good catch! Yes, I can. So, sorry, I can actually add material between V and O.

Adding on to that, what about "j'ai pris la voiture hier"?

Posted: **Sat Aug 01, 2020 1:54 pm**

Hallow XIII wrote: ↑Thu Jul 30, 2020 4:32 am
Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:29 am
akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:24 am Can you say Je prends souvent la voiture?
Ah, yes, good catch! Yes, I can. So, sorry, I can actually add material between V and O.
Adding on to that, what about "j'ai pris la voiture hier"?

Yes, absolutely.

Posted: **Sun Aug 09, 2020 1:35 am**

The original test has the same problem with the "no marking of arguments other than the subject on the verb" item. I thought it was an improvement to exclude languages with the fairly un-European situation of no person marking at all, but if English and French both have object agreement, it's not clear this should be here. I'm also confused about what it should mean to not mark objects on the verb. In fact several SAE languages are listed as having object marking on verbs by WALS (Spanish, Greek, Albanian and Hungarian).

To make it more meaningful, it could be written to specify affixes as opposed to clitics.

Meanwhile, this is how I arrived at my score for English. (This time it seems to be 88.75, not 92.5.) I think my wording is sometimes unclear, though I tried to get around this by linking to the chapters each question refers to.

More: show

Probably the most dubious are gender, subject pronouns and object marking. If we flip these, the score goes down to 82.5.

Posted: **Sun Aug 09, 2020 1:51 am**

I guess the most useful way to draw the line for the purposes of this test is to distinguish languages in which there are object markers that regularly occur even in the presence of an overt object NP. You'll want to decide what to say about languages in which those object markers occur only with (say) definite or animate objects, and maybe make it explicit that the overt object NPs in question aren't dislocated ones. Something like that would at least give English, French, and German the classification they intuitively ought to get. (Depending on details Spanish could get counted as having object marking, but that's a lot less counterintuitive; in fact it's how WALS judges things.)

Posted: **Sun Aug 09, 2020 5:03 am**

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Aug 09, 2020 1:51 am I guess the most useful way to draw the line for the purposes of this test is to distinguish languages in which there are object markers that regularly occur even in the presence of an overt object NP.

This. When there is no person marker in the presence of an overt NP, it hardly makes sense to call it agreement, as no agreeing is happening. This is where English is.

Posted: **Sun Aug 09, 2020 4:00 pm**

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sun Aug 09, 2020 1:51 am Something like that would at least give English, French, and German the classification they intuitively ought to get. (Depending on details Spanish could get counted as having object marking, but that's a lot less counterintuitive; in fact it's how WALS judges things.)

Of course, written French has perfect tenses agreeing with the preceding direct object.

Posted: **Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:37 pm**

Made some changes so English and French don't slip through the cracks.

1.1. Case, tense, aspect and mood not productively marked with particles, tones or ablaut
1.3. Strong preference for suffixes over other types of affix (suffixing index more than 80% of the affixing index)
2.1. No productive use of full-word reduplication
2.14. Pronominal subjects normally expressed with both subject pronouns and verbal affixes
2.15. Subject/agent marked on the verb, but object/patient not marked when the object/patient is a noun phrase

Posted: **Fri Aug 14, 2020 6:21 pm**

HazelFiver wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:37 pm Made some changes so English and French don't slip through the cracks.

[
2.15. Subject/agent marked on the verb, but object/patient not marked when the object/patient is a noun phrase

What do "subject/agent" and "object/patient" mean? Do they mean 'agent as subject' and 'patient as object'? For example, in The dog was given a bone, is the only question whether verb agrees with a bone? Can the first "marked" be replaced by "sometimes marked" and "not marked" be replaced by "never marked"?

Posted: **Fri Aug 14, 2020 7:21 pm**

Richard W wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 6:21 pm
HazelFiver wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:37 pm Made some changes so English and French don't slip through the cracks.

[
2.15. Subject/agent marked on the verb, but object/patient not marked when the object/patient is a noun phrase

What do "subject/agent" and "object/patient" mean? Do they mean 'agent as subject' and 'patient as object'? For example, in The dog was given a bone, is the only question whether verb agrees with a bone? Can the first "marked" be replaced by "sometimes marked" and "not marked" be replaced by "never marked"?

This is just how I worded it. "Subject/object" is more traditional, and the original test uses the word "subject", but chapter 102 discusses "A and P arguments". Agent/patient would be more correct here. Maybe "Verbs agree with noun-phrase agents but not NP patients" or similar.

I'm not sure about sentences like these. The verb may also agree with the dog as a promoted "subject" depending on how the language does passive voice. I would judge a language by active-voice sentences.

Posted: **Fri Aug 14, 2020 8:37 pm**

Richard W wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 6:21 pm
HazelFiver wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 5:37 pm
[
2.15. Subject/agent marked on the verb, but object/patient not marked when the object/patient is a noun phrase
What do "subject/agent" and "object/patient" mean? Do they mean 'agent as subject' and 'patient as object'? For example, in The dog was given a bone, is the only question whether verb agrees with a bone? Can the first "marked" be replaced by "sometimes marked" and "not marked" be replaced by "never marked"?

This is why, I think, the WALS authors also needed to introduce the concept of canonical sentences, where some specific situation would be prioritized. In this case, it'd be something like sentences in the active voice, with an animate subject, with a direct object that is directly affected, like "The dog bit the bone". What a language would do with "The dog was given a bone" would be irrelevant.

This is one of many examples of the eternal problem of how to constrain linguistic comparison in a way that the results are still meaningful and interesting.

Zompist Bboard Again

SAE phonology and grammar tests

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