--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
>
> That does not explain why the object is also marked in PIE, nor how
> intransitive subjects acquired ergative-marking.
Certainly these are legitimate concerns that you've brought up. The
hour is late right now, but I'd like to try to address the points
you've made.
In many languages, there is redundancy in expressing subjects,
objects, and/or etc. Some examples: Spanish marks animate objects of
verbs with the preposition "a"; Georgian often markes objects with
the dative case (-s[a]); Japanese has a 3-way marking system: "ga"
for transitive subject, "wa" for intransitive subject (also a topic
marker), and "o" for object. However, with the Japanese example, it
is important to note that using "o" (originally *wo) to mark objects
is relatively recent; originally the object was unmarked. So,
obviously, redundancy in subject- and/or object-marking does occur,
and is perhaps commonplace.
In the scheme of things, extending the genitive case to ergative
usage makes semantic sense. The Indo-European genitive, as I
understand it, was properly the case of origin; that is, the case
expressing "of" or "from." In a language that had no prior
distinction between subject and object, save for position, or whose
earlier marking scheme had disappeared somehow, expressing the
transitive subject with the genitive makes sense because it would
indicate the origin of an action. Furthermore, such semantics could
only apply to animate objects; that is, objects capable of acting.
Inanimate nouns, being incapable of action, were never expressed as
grammatical subjects; the closest they could come to those was to
take the ablative/instrumental case (to form an "oblique subject").
I think right now we can all agree that the ablative/instrumental
suffix was -t or -d, and perhaps a vowel preceded that. Certainly a
vowel originally followed the dental stop also (cf. Proto-Uralic
ablative in *-ta/รค).
This brings us to the origin of the accusative case. That case is
understood as denoting the target of an action. Thus, the PIE (and
Uralic) accusative case was probably a locative or similar case
first, and the form was likely -ma (later reduced to -m). I'll also
venture to say that expressing objects with a locative(-ish) case
probably arose idiomatically, subsequently becoming a truly
grammatical feature.
Now then, employment as the nominative for intransitive subjects. I
think the order of development was thus: first, extension of genitive
case to an ergative role; extension of locative(-ish) case to
accusative role; and finally, extension of ergative to intransitive
subject. This means that for a (probably) brief period of time, PIE
(or its ancestor) had a three-way contrast: -s for animate transitive
subjects, -d/t for inanimate transitive "subjects," -m(a) for all
objects, and -null for all intransitive subjects. Languages that
have such a three-way contrast are rare, implying that such a system
is inherently unstable -- it will collapse into either a nominative-
accusative, or an ergative-absolutive system. In PIE, the former
occurred. The reasoning seems to be rather obvious: it seems far
easier to connect the ergative and intransitive subjects than to
connect the latter and the objects. With such a connection being
made, the former ergative/genitive case became a nominative case, and
lost its originative meaning altogether. Of course, this meant
problems for expressing genitive relations; hence, the additional
formant -yo to the "thematic" genitive. As for the genitive of root
nouns, there appear to be two possibilities: one is that the
nominative and genitive became distinguished based on intonation
(i.e., tonal/pitch accent), or the thematic genitive/ergative -os was
borrowed as the root-noun genitive. The same may be said about the
root-noun ablative/instrumental.
I do not claim that the above is necessarily correct. It is
certainly not complete, nor definitive, for I am no professional PIE
linguist. However, it makes logical sense to me.
Now, I will attempt a general explanation of the origins of PIE. At
some stage, PIE's parent language (Nostratic, Eurasiatic, or
whatever) was mostly isolating. Furthermore, it had little or no
distinction between nouns and verbs; the function of a word was
primarily indicated positionally -- i.e., SOV word-order. As
Greenberg kindly pointed out, such a word-order usually means
postpositions and modifiers preceding their heads. One conclusion
reached from this is that the nominative endings of (late) PIE were
likely not from an enclitic demonstrative pronoun, since
demonstratives, being modifiers, would usually (if not always)
precede their heads...
Sorry, there was going to be more, but I'm too tired right now. I'll
pick up again when I read the replies to this.
- Rob