LINGUIST List 11.544

Sat Mar 11 2000

Qs: Subcategorization, Ejective Dissimilation

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Friedrich Knopf, "Love" and subcategorization.
2. MaryAnn Cockerill, ejective dissimilation

 I'm a second linguistic student at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada)
and I discovered something intriguing. I would like 
you to evaluate what I found and comment on what it means. I talked with my
syntax professor and he did not know it, so I'm 
assuming it is something new.
 An innocent looking verb "love" poses a serious problem to the
subcategorization frame. Ordinarily, love requires a NP as a 
complement and this complement cannot be left implicit. * I love. However,
if it is put into past tense, it suddenly becomes 
grammatical: I loved.
 This sounds trivial, but considering tense is a extralinguistic feature
it should not, in ideal, affect subcategorization of words. I 
tried to come up with other word, but I could not find any other words that
behave like "love." However, I found another word 
that may change its subcategorization with mood. The word is "plan." 
Ordinarily, we do not say, "I plan." (or *I planned, *I am 
planning, etc.) I discussed with several native speakers, but they are not
sure if "I plan" is grammatical (as in "What do you do 
for living?" "?I plan.". I appreciate it if you can comment on this. But
the sentence becomes clearly grammatical if it used in a 
subjunctive clause as in, "If I had planned, I would have done better."
 I'm suspecting that there are words that change their subcategorization
with each verbal categories: valence, voice, aspect, 
tense, agreement (person, number, gender), and mood. Some of them are very
obvious (e.g. valence, voice) but some of them 
are more difficult. If this is true, we may have to take another serious
look at subcategorization and we may have another way 
of classifying verbs.

- 
Tosh

e-mail: lastcreatureyahoo.com
homepage: http://www.freespeech.org/lastman/index.html

Hello,

I'm looking for examples of ejective dissimilation -- for example,
constraints on having more than one ejective consonant in a word, so that
one or more underlyingly ejective segment is deglottalized or otherwise
repaired. If anyone knows of such a process I would like to hear about
it -- my email address is cockerilfas.harvard.edu. Thanks,

MaryAnn Cockerill