Re: [tied] Got to thinkin' about word order

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003 22:02:04 +0000, Glen Gordon
<glengordon01@...> wrote:

>The issue in Mandarin, an SVO language, that inspired me was from
>a conversation with a Chinese friend I know.

Mandarin is a bit of a special case. Quoting Comrie's "Language
Universals and Linguistic Typology":

There is a nearly exceptionless universal that languages in which
the relative clause precedes the head noun (RelN, i.e. the opposite
from the English order in relative clause constructions) are
verb-final. The known exception to this universal is Chinese, which
has the orders RelN but SVO.

>>In fact the PIE triple marking of subject (*-s or *-0) and object
>>(*-m or *-0) almost certainly does derive from the amalgamation of
>>different verbal constructions using different markers for
>>ergative/absolutive and/or nominative/accusative and/or
>>possessor/possessed.
>
>Actually, sorta. We may simply conclude that there was an early
>grammatical and syntactic distinction between animate and inanimate
>nouns in the accusative with an originally unmarked nominative.

The question is, how did the nominative (or the accusative, for that
matter) become marked? Quite possibly, this happened first in a
verbal category where such marking would arise naturally, and was only
later expanded analogically. If the original system was accusative,
with O-marking (possibly subject to phonetic wear), S-marking may have
arisen out of a passive construction. Conversely, an original
ergative system, with S-marking, might have acquired O-marking in an
antipassive construction. A possessive construction, such as can
appear in a subjunctive, or a stative, leads to S-marking not only for
transitive, but also intransitive subjects, which makes it an
extremely suitable candidate.

>I think that you are too obsessed with having an immediately
>preceding ergative Kartvelian-like stage for IE whereas my
>conclusion is that there were intermediary stages in between.
>No stage of IE as I define it (between 7000 and 4000 BCE) was ever
>"purely ergative".

Kartvelian is anything but "purely ergative". Ergativity only appears
in the aorist.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...