--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> You claimed that the universal was: "if a particular phenomenon
applies to
> direct objects, it should also apply to subjects", with a
prediction that
> "there are no languages in which the verb agrees with just the
direct
> object".
That's why I've found the OE sentence violates the above universal
under the GB framework.
> Two questions:
>
> - Was the universal formulated by persons adhering to GB,
Minimalism, or
> some such framework? In a framework unhindered by INFL-nodes, we
are free
> to view both the auxiliary and the participle as constituent parts
of "the
> verb", as it is mentioned in the second formulation of the
universal.
That implicational universal was established decades before GB
emerged. So the person who wrote down the universals(Joeseph
Greenberg, maybe?) probably adhered to other framework other than GB,
but I don't know the way he draws phrase structure trees.
What I've found tricky about the issue is that we may view the matter
differently depending on the framework we adopt.
By the way, I want to know what syntactic framework treats the
auxiliary and the verb as a whole, because I'm not familiar with
other frameworks.
> - What are the exact requirements of the universal? It is plainly
the case
> that Old English is not a language in which the verb agrees only
with the
> direct object. In fact, in the vast majority of sentences, the
verb rather
> agrees exclusively with the subject (e.g. "Ælfred kyning háte?grétan
> Wærfer?biscep"). Is the universal formulated such that it should
hold in
> _every sentence_ or just in general?
The idea about the implicational univesal is that there is a
hierarchy of grammatical relations in human language with the more
common(less marked) ones being in the higher level, and any process
that applies to the relations in the lower level(such as indirect
object) also applies to the relations in the higher level(such as
direct object, in comparison). And if a process applies to direct
objects, it should also apply to subjects; verb agreement is one such
case, according to the book I've read.
But the author doesn't specify what type of verbs the implicational
universal applies to. Some people I discussed with think the
universal only applies to finite verbs, but that viewpoint is nowhere
mentioned in the requirements of the universal.
There is one question I want to ask regarding Old English: Is the
sentence I cited common or rare in OE? Maybe it is produced by a
careless speaker or writer occassionally and therefore should not be
taken as serious evidence against the universal.
Ray