LINGUIST List 5.1231

Fri 04 Nov 1994

Qs: Tagalog, Unaccusative langs, Analytic/synthetic, Eskimo

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Directory

1. Loren Allen Billings, Tagalog predicate-borrowing
2. , Q: Unaccusative alias active languages
3. "Christopher A. Johnson", Query: Inflected and Positional Languages
4. David Prager Branner, Help: Eskimo words for snow

I am forwarding the following message as a query to the LINGUIST and
SEALANG-L (SE Asian Languages) lists. Tony Kroch recently presented
some of his work on how languages change head-directionality and the
like. One of the data was the constituent _ki_, a borrowing from Per-
sian to Hindi, which, unlike other complementizers (clause-introducing
elements) in modern Hindi, appears at the initial edge of the clause it
introduces. During the course of Tony's talk (presented at the Jersey
Syntax Circle's September meeting at Princeton), other such borrowings
were raised. Leonard Babby (Princeton), mentioned that the same element
_ki_ from Persian has been borrowed into Turkish, and is unique as well
with regard to directionality. I mentioned the following possible datum
from Tagalog which I now ask you fellow linguists to enlighten us on.

First, however, a note on how to get Tony's paper (taken from the handout
to his talk, entitled "Morphosyntactic Variation"): "This paper is
available by anonymous ftp from the Linguistics Department server at the
University of Pennsylvania: babel.ling.upenn.edu. Anyone who would like
a hard copy of the paper can request one from me [Anthony Kroch] at
krochchange.ling.upenn.edu."

The details of the Tagalog message follow, as well as specific questions
at the very end of this transmission:
 ---------------------------Original message----------------------------
Tony,
I spoke to you briefly following your recent talk at the Jersey Syntax
Circle. I mentioned that Tagalog had two different constituent orders
dependent on what may be a borrowing from Spanish.

Usually the clause order is the verb, with all sorts of morphology,
followed by all the arguments with no SYNTACTIC order required (but
some prosodic restrictions, i.e., clitic pronouns have to precede full-
word arguments, etc.). An example:

1> Uminom ang bata ng tubig.
 drank TR kid PT water

 'The kid drank (some) water.'

("TR" is for "trigger", something like a topic. There is verbal morphology
in agreement with the trigger. "PT" is for "patient". These are the terms
used by Paul Schachter in his more recent papers on Tagalog, for example,
his chapter "Tagalog" in _The World's Major Languages_ (Bernard Comrie,
editor), circa 1987.)

Either order of the two nominals is allowed in <1>. I've seen up to
four nominals--not all of them arguments--follow a verb in any order.

There is the other order, which has a very "Manila-ish" flavor, such as
the following:

2> Ang bata ay uminom ng tubig.

There is only one order allowed in this example. If there were more than
two nominals, then the remaining post-verbal nominals could have any order.
(I want to keep this simple.) I suspect (but don't know this for sure),
that Tagalog _ay_ (orthographically; phonetically it begins with a glottal
stop) is a borrowing of the Spanish _hay_ (where the _h_ is a glottal stop)
as in _No hay agua._ `there is no water.' I don't fully understand the use
of Spanish _hay_, since I don't know that language, but I understand that
it is some sort of existential. In case you, or anyone you consult, do(es)
know that language, I can report that Spanish loan words in Tagalog are
mainly from the Andalucian dialect of Spanish.

The reason I mentioned this to you is that _ay_ may be something like _ki_
in Persian, spread to Turkish, etc. I believe Bob Frank also made a
comment about some markedness restriction on the direction that left/right-
headedness can take. I believe he said, quoting Kayne perhaps, that right-
headed languages can borrow/acquire left-headed lexemes, but not the other
way around. I don't know exactly what to make of the data above. I can
speculate a little, however:

Let's assume that pre-_ay_ Tagalog had a simple VP clause in which the
trigger can, in certain cases be preposed (unlike the other nominals--not
shown here), which is presumably akin to topicalization universally. Let
us also assume that these nominals got Case through the prefixal elements
like _ang_ and _ng_ above, i.e., denecessitizing "movement to get Case".
Along comes Spanish _ay_, possibly I or C in category. It also requres a
specifier for whatever reason. (Incidentally, _ay_ can contract as ff:

3> Ang bata'y uminom ng tubig. (same gloss as <1> or <2>)

This suggests that _ay_ (or its contracted form _'y_, phonetically [y])
may have a Wackernagelian restriction along with a pre-verbal ordering
requirement that in effect "conspire" to force one nominal to precede _ay_.

***************************************************************************
QUESTIONS FOR LINGUIST AND SEALANG-L READERS:

1. Can any of you confirm any of the speculation on my part in the above
message, especially that Tagalog _ay_ comes from Spanish _hay_. If so,
kindly forward your comments to me and the citations of any sources on
this or your own personal observations. I would also like to get in touch
with anyone who knows a good deal about the language contacts that took
place between the two languages from the mid 1500s to the early this
century (when contacts ended abruptly following the Spanish-American War).

2. Any other such phenomena would also be of interest to Tony, of course,
especially counterexamples to the claim raised above (by Robert Frank, U.
of Delaware), that only right-headed languages (usually non-Indo-European)
can acquire left-headed lexemes (usually from Indo-European languages).
Tony did mention that this may epiphenomenal evidence, since the facts of
recent world history are such that Indo-European languages are the ones
(we know about) that, for whatever reason, had sway over other languages.

3. Kindly forward this query to any other list that may be able to shed
light on the general issue. Most of you probably know of collegues at
your respective institutions who are not on line but might know answers;
kindly print them out a copy of this query as well.

Kindly address responses to me at any of the following addresses and I
will post a joint (LINGUIST and SEALANG-L) summary.

Best, --Loren Billings Internet: billingsprinceton.edu
 Bitnet: billingspucc
 POBox 891, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903-0891 USA

I have been scouring the literature on unaccusative (as generative
grammarians like to call them following Perlmutter I guess) alias
active (as Klimov, Lehmann, and many others call them) constructions,
that is, ones where different classes of intransitive verbs have
different syntax. However, I am having trouble finding examples
of so-called deep syntactic processes that are sensitive to such
distinctions (except for ones which are apparently universal, like
the resultative facts recently discussed by Bresnan and others). So
are there syntactic processes (other than agreement and case) which
distinguish the different kinds of "subjects" of intransitive verbs
in languages with unaccusative (=active) patterns?

Please respond to me and I will post a summary.

I have been wondering about the evolution of inflected and positional
languages. How and why did English evolve from a mainly inflected language
into a mainly positional one? The same question applies to most of the
Romance languages as well. Are there any living or dead Sino-Tibetan
languages that are inflected? Has a positional language ever involved
into an inflected language?

I'm sorry if the topic seems basic or the terms are not used properly. I
am only beginning my study of linguistics. Any responses and/or
references would be most appreciated.

Chris Johnson cjohnsonbronze.coil.com

There is talk again on the Linguist list about the "great Eskimo snow
hoax".

I may be imagining things, but the people who talk about this never seem
to be specialists in Eskimo languages. I would like to hear from an Inuit
or Tlingit specialist on just what the snow situation really is in these
languages. Frankly, I find it rather hard to believe.

Rural southern Chinese dialects have lots of words for different kinds of
rice, different parts of the rice plant, crops at different times of year,
and so on. I have heard them myself, written them down with my own pen.
Mongolian languages have lots of words for horses and goats of different
ages and colors and types. There was an article on this not long ago in
_Mintzwu Yeuwen_, a Chinese periodical. French has so many different
words for the processes involved in cooking that English-speaking chefs
have to borrow them wholesale, despairing of translation; you can easily
verify this by looking in Larousse or asking a trained chef. Coastal Miin
dialects have more words for crab that you could ever believe unless you
have visited one of the port restaurants in Ilan or Fwujiann. How about
the endless vocabulary for boats and their myriad parts in English (also
in Hokkien, spoken by another seagoing people). So why shouldn't Inuit
have a dozen or more words for different kinds of cold precipitation?

I would like to hear from a specialist and settle this thing - one way or
the other - once and for all.

David Prager Branner, Yuen Ren Society
Asian L&L, DO-21, University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195 <charmiiu.washington.edu>