Summary Details
| Query: |
Animacy II
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| Author: | Andrew Carnie | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
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| Summary: |
Dear Colleagues, A few weeks ago I posted a query ( LINGUIST 9.1462 ) about the link between definiteness and animacy, and received many interesting and informative messages. After posting a summary ( LINGUIST 9.1653 ), I received even more interesting an informative messages. Here they are: ************* From: Sean Witty <wittysan@hotmail.com> Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Korean expresses overt definition in Subject position and uses animation in the assignment of Gender. Witty's general rule of Gender assignment (all languages): 1. All nouns have gender of one sort or another, irregardless of biological sex. 2. Nouns referring to humans, or non-human nouns (including French occupational nouns) with definite Sex, are categorized +Animate, and receive Initial Masculine Gender. 3. Other nouns receive are categorized -Animate, and receive Initial Neuter Gender. 4. Gender by association. Nouns receiving Initial Neuter Gender may be reclassified as either Masculine or Feminine (or whatever, in the case of some African languages), depending on declension. Thus, the Latin 'tabula' is feminine because it follows the first declension, in which all +Animate nouns are also Feminine (to include, curiously, four that typically refer to males). 5. In some languages, i.e., Anglo-Saxon, non-adult nouns may be assigned Neuter, or some other gender, to designate them as being +Animate, -Adult. In German, for example, indefinite children are assigned Neuter Gender, while only male children retain Masculine Gender (I'm not sure why, but I think it is for non-linguistic reasons, unless it is to designate that the child is male). 6. Among +Adult nouns, female nouns are reassigned Feminine Gender, while all other nouns retain the Initial Masculine. 7. At all levels of distinction beyond the first, there may exist other gender categories to classify these distinctions. For each of these additional classifications, there may also be another variant applied to the Initial Neuter nouns. Thus, it is possible for a language to have in excess of 17 gender classifications. Given these principles, which are by no means complete, a Korean adult noun will receive Initial Masculine Gender, unless the noun is of definite female sex. Thus, a word like 'hakseng', student, carries Masculine Gender when indefinite, and Feminine Gender when known to be female (possibly 'yohakseng', but this is rare usage, pronominal inflection is more likely; 'kunun', he and that person; 'kunyonun', she). Irrespective of this Definite/Indefinite relationship, a definite noun takes either the suffix '-i' or '-ga', depending on the final sound. An indefinite noun takes either the suffix '-un' or '-nun', also dependent on the final sound. Thus, 'kugo' (vowel assimilation of '-ga'), 'kunyoga', 'kunun', and 'kunyonun' are all possible. Hope this helps. ***************** From: bingfu <bingfu@usc.edu> Hi, Andrew, I just wonder whether are you aware of Bernard Comrie's following works. 1977: Subject and direct object in Uralic languages: A functional explanation of case-marking system. Etudes Finno-Ougriennes 12 (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado) 5-17 1987: Definite and Animate Direct Objects: A natural class. Linguistica Silesiana 3: 13-21. Where he extensively discussed the phenomena related to your issue and provide a quite convincing explanation. Best Bingfu Lu ******** From: "Oesten Dahl" <oesten@ling.su.se> It strikes me that you and many of the people who have responded to your query have been talking quite happily about "marking" without realizing what it presupposes. The problem is that whereas you may claim that definiteness is marked in many languages, you'll have to look hard for something that you could truly label an "animacy marker". What you do find is that animate and inanimate nouns are treated differently by various grammatical rules. For instance, as Martin Haspelmath pointed out, only animate datives can be raised by possessor raising. The closest you get to marking of animacy is semantically-based gender, but it is seldom so clean-cut that you can say there is an animacy marker, or inanimacy marker for that matter. You might want to have a look at the following paper: Oesten Dahl and Kari Fraurud. 1996. Animacy in Grammar and Discourse. In Thorstein Fretheim & Jeanette K. Gundel (eds.), Reference and Referent Accessibility, 47-64. Pragmatics and beyond 38. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Best regards, Oesten Dahl ***** From: bwald <bwald@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU> Andrew Carnie's inquiry into the relationship between animacy and definiteness escaped my attention until I read his summary. Otherwise, I would have discussed the Bantu situation, inlcuding Swahili. Fortunately, Kieran Snyder gave him much useful information about Bantu, esp Swahili. A few of K's points, however, seem to be incomplete or inaccurate, as I understand them. EG >Now, in the case of Bantu .... there's >also object-marking to consider, but really the word order variation >where it exists (say, in Swahili) boils down again to hearer-givenness, >and the object-marking is completely determined by animacy and >hearer-givenness.... Swahili is representative of a limited area of Bantu, and is relatively extreme in requiring object-marking of an animate over an inanimate, regardless of the information status of the animate and a possible concurrent inanimate object. The more general situation in Bantu is complicated and much more varied, but can be traced to a situation (still existent for many Bantu languages) in which "hearer-givenness" (I usually call it "contextual topicality", a slightly different concept) determines object-marking. EG, a preverbal NP object is contextually topical by the nature of its syntactic position and requires object marking, regardless of the animacy or information status of a concurrent postverbal object. That is, if A and B are both objects, the object marker MUST refer to A in the structure: A SM-TM-*OM*-V (B). It cannot refer to B. As K notes, that is not the case for Swahili, where, if B is animate, esp human, and A is not, the *OM* can only refer to B (and that's only the beginning of the conditions on Swahili OM reference, as can be gleaned from my following comments). One of the conditions which K gives for Swahili is inaccurate -- as I understand K's statement. >2) if [two objects] are equal in animacy value but not in hearer-givenness, >object-mark the hearer-given one, whichever it is That is not the case. In the context just given, thematic role restricts OM reference. EG, if I say "I called some doctors for my mother", ONLY "my mother" can receive OM reference -- because it is the "extended" object (object of a verb extension). Similarly, if I say "I called my mother for some doctors", ONLY "some doctors" can receive OM reference. The hearer-givenness status *does NOT matter*. In the case of a first or second person object, these are inherently more topical than a third person object (they are always hearer-given). If I say "I called some doctors for you", ONLY "you" can receive OM reference (as an extended object). If I say "I called you for some doctors", I CANNOT make "some doctors" an extended object at all. I have to use a prepositional paraphrase along the lines of "I called you for the sake of some doctors". In that case, only "you" is a GRAMMATICAL object at all, and thus can be (indeed must be) referred to by an OM. "some doctors" is NOT an extended object, but the object of the PREPOSITIONAL phrase "for the sake of". Such major grammatical recasting is not obvious from K's statement quoted above. K's next statement is consequently misleading: >3) if they are equal in both animacy and hearer-givenness, object mark >the recipient (ie indirect) object No. Hearer-givenness plays no grammatical role in object marking, only animacy and role. Well, in view of what I said above, my last statement is not quite accurate. Hearer-givenness only plays a role in that when an inherently more topical object (a first or second person) is put in a direct object role and an inherently less topical "object" (third person) is put in an indirect object role, the less topical "object" CANNOT be expressed as an extended object at all, but must be expressed a prepositional object. With regard to the verb, then, it is not a GRAMMATICAL object. For those who are unsure of what I mean by opposing "grammatical" and prepositional object, it is a general Bantu grammatical distinction which can be illustrated by the following Swahili examples: ni-li-ku-it-*i*-a tabibu (I-call-OM=you-call-APPLIED-FV doctor) "I called a/the doctor for you" "you" is a GRAMMATICAL object. It is the extended object made possible by the extension -i-, usually called "applied" or "applicative". The object happens to be interpreted as benefactive in contexts like the one in the example. "doctor" is also a GRAMMATICAL object, as indeed the "direct object" (object of the root transitive verb) always is. The example CANNOT mean "I called you for the doctor". ni-li-ku-it-a kwa ajili ya tabibu (I-Past-OM=you-call-FV for sake of doctor) "I called you for (the sake of)/on behalf of a/the doctor" ONLY "you" is a GRAMMATICAL object. There is NO extended object or verb extension. "doctor" is the "object" only of the prepositional phrase "for the sake of/on behalf of". Swahili balks at saying: ????ni-li-mw-it-i-a wewe tabibu (???I-Past-OM=him-call-APPLIED-FV you doctor), or any other word order permutation of the same. K continues: >In Kinyarwanda, which lacks the relevant word-order variation but >which has object-marking, the above hierarchy of hearer-givenness and >animacy also obtains. K's comments for Swahili above are better suited to Nyarwanda, NOT for Swahili (and various adjacent languages). The way I figure it on the basis of extensive Bantu data, originally object-marking in the context of concurrent objects (where one is an extensional object and the other a direct object) was indeed based on contextual topicality. Whichever object was more topical could receive object-marking reference; even a third person could receive object marking reference in spite of a concurrent first or second person object, as long as it was more topical in context (more what the longer stretch of discourse was about). That remains the case in some Bantu languages, e.g., Zulu, etc. Most often such object-marking reference would be the only reference to the object in the clause. And almost invariably it would be a DEFINITE object. Pragmatically, humans are inherently more topical than inanimates. Thus, by the process of grammaticalisation in a certain area of Bantu including Swahili, humans became grammatically more topical and, regardless of their contextual topicality, require object-marking (as long as they are referential -- even Swahili still varies on object-marking for non-referential human objects, such as "virgin" in "marry a virgin", where that object does not have a specific referent but only indicates a type.) Stated simply, the connection between animacy (esp human vs. non-human) and definiteness is the pragmatic connection of inherent topicality (which includes the invariable hearer-givenness of first and second persons). As far as I know, when inherent topicality grammaticalises, any grammatical processes that applied to definiteness generalise to (indefinite) humans. Thematic role (or "case" or whatever) is a distinct dimension in Bantu historical change. It adjusted differently to grammaticalisation of inherent topicality in different Bantu areas, and is too complex to discuss here. I've written a cycle of papers on object-marking in Swahili and various other Bantu languages (and plan to return to to it with additional details at some point). My most complete statement about the facts and origins of Swahili and most other systems of Bantu object-marking was published (more recently than the date suggests) as: "East Coast Bantu and the Evolution of Constraints on Passivisation" in Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA) 15 (1994) 211-315. -- Benji Wald ****** From: Asya Pereltsvaig <aperel@po-box.mcgill.ca> I am very interested in your work on the relationship between definiteness and animacy. I am working on the relationship between definiteness/specificity/animacy and Case marking. In particular, in many languages (both nominative-accusative and ergative) Case marking depends on some notion of specificity of the object. However, some languages go by definiteness or specificity (either overtly marked or understood) while others go by animacy (and some go by both). I was also looking for a way to unify definiteness and animacy in one phenomenon. However, this seems to be intuitively wrong. This is why I am interested in the solution proposed by Jelinek to this problem of animacy patterning with definiteness in word order and Case marking phenomena. I would be very interested in exchanging ideas on this subject. Good luck with your work, Asya ***** From: ana de la fuente <anagaby@worldnet.fr> [Editor's note, I had to delete some of the lines of data from this message because they were displayed in a character set that LINGUIST is currently unable to support (support for such non-USASCII symbols is coming soon). AC] I'm a mexican student living in Paris (Paris III). I'm writing you because I would like to contribute to your question about <animacy and definiteness>. Unfortunately I just subscribed to THE LINGUIST LIST a week ago, and I had only access to the summary of your question. I'm working on the syntax of classical nahuatl, and last year one of the things I explored was the order of constituents in the transitive phrase, and the possibility of the existence of a VP in this language. I found out that the definite/ indefinite reading of the NPs affects the order of the constituents. With a definite reading of the arguments the order relatively free, but with indefinite reading the order is fix. Another characteristic that could interest you is that both definite and indefinite noun can be marqued by animacy (which is overt only in plural contexts). Here are some examples from my thesis: [Relative order (VOS et VSO) in many mayan languages is determined by definiteness] These can also be observed in classical nahuatl. An indefinite object occupies the first position to the right of the transitive verb, the complement position [ [ [ VO ] ]S] [Nahautl data deleted] We can see that a definite noun is necessary preceded by a definite particle. The object noun (definite or indefinite) can be animate or inanimate. The difference in animacy is overt in plural forms with both definite and indefinte object arguments. [Nahautl data deleted] These restriction on definiteness and animacy of plurals is also reflected on the verb, by means of the obligatory agreement with the arguments of the verb. a. With definite agreement, there is preference for the animate object in bitransitive verbs. The 3person agreement disappears" (4a), only the plural agreement "stays" (4b): [data deleted] b. With indefinite pronominal argument agreement, which is overtly marqued by the accusative form (inanimate) and a dative form (animate), both objects appear simultaneously in the verb stem, with an animacy hierarchy reflected in the order of the clitics: [data deleted] These only happens with the object of the verb, since the subject (the agent) cannot have an indefinite reading in nahuatl. ******* From: Sarah G. Thomason <sally@isp.pitt.edu> I don't remember seeing your original LINGUIST query, but the one response you got about Slavic could be expanded a bit, maybe usefully. In the earliest Slavic texts (which are Old Church Slavic), the incipient category animacy that your respondent mentioned is itself linked very closely to definiteness: in the particular noun class (masculines, but it's not the only noun class where masculine nouns occur), in the earliest texts, only *definite* grammatically animate nouns get the special animacy marking. Usually. So in "I saw a man", "man" would not get the animate marking; but in "I saw the man", "man" would be marked for animacy. (The only grammatically animate nouns at that early stage in the development of the category were free adult human males; the semantics of the category has changed in all Slavic languages, and the link to definiteness also disappeared long ago -- now any accusative noun in the appropriate noun class(es), which vary from lg. to lg., get the animacy marking.) The Slavic literature on the definiteness-animacy link says -- and maybe someone else who answered your query already pointed this out? - that it makes good intuitive sense, at least, for animate nouns to get the special accusative marking, because sound changes had merged the nominative and accusative suffixes in the relevant noun class, and the chances for confusion in a sentence like "dog bites man", given that Slavic had & has free word order, are a lot greater than in a sentence like "dog bites hamburger". (That doesn't explain the definiteness link, but there are of course other lgs., e.g. Turkish, where only definite objects get marked accusative; and read on.) The source of the animacy category in Slavic is a mystery, the subject of long controversy. I gave in to temptation some years back and published my own hunch, which is that it arose when speakers of Uralic (specifically Finnic) languages shifted to Slavic and brought along their own comparable category -- namely, definite nouns with a special marking in the accusative. The grammatical patterning is identical to the early Slavic one, EXCEPT that Uralic lgs. have no noun-class system at all, so there's no link in Uralic with animacy: only with definiteness. And it's not all of Finnic, but only a couple of Finnic lgs.; that, together with the problematic early age of the proposed Finnic-to-Slavic shift, is the main stumbling block for my hypothesis; one doesn't know how old the feature is in Finnic. Still, the link with definiteness is indisputable even within Slavic, and if it DOES come from Finnic substratum influence, it's a case where definiteness eventually got reinterpreted as an animacy distinction -- and the earliest Slavic texts show the beginning stages of that set of changes. This probably doesn't help you much, but I thought I'd tell you about it just in case it helps you make a connection with something in your own data. |
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| LL Issue: | 9.1726 | |
| Date Posted: | 06-Dec-1998 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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