Let's imagine a language that at some recent point has rearranged its noun classification. (Biological) Feminines have become distinct from other nouns, and now masculines and inanimates form the masculine gender.
The language has previously not had proper subjects, but is in the process of developing them. Specifically masculine animates are acquiring the status of being "proper subjects". Feminines, however, differ in having only some of the subject properties. (However, they acquire congruence marking on verbs to an even greater extent than animate masculines.) Inanimates trigger no verbal congruence anywhere.
As for congruence, this causes the following situation:
animate masculine agent present? → masculine congruence
feminine agent or patient or topic present? → feminine congruence (overrules masculine congruence)
inanimate masculine? → triggers no congruence
What syntactical things might we expect from these different levels of subjecthood? Let's look at some properties subjects often have. Let us start with reflexive binding. Masculines proper and feminines both have this subject property, but inanimates do not. Thus
She washes self/*her
Heanimate washes self/*him
Heinanimate wash *self/it
Neuters behave differently with regards to control, so you can't say things analogous to
the house seems to be on fire
it would require
seems that the house is on fire
but
he/she seems to be doing fine
would be permitted. Another thing could be that feminines and masculines can be implied, covert arguments. For feminines, this would probably apply both for subjects and objects. A thing that is difficult to make sense of with English examples is resistance to extraction. Apparently, subjects are cross-linguistically less resistant, but in English, perversely, they are more resistant:
Evert thinks that Robert gave Lisa a gift
*who does Evert think that gave Lisa a gift
what does Evert think that Robert gave Lisa?
who does Evert think that Robert gave a gift to?
In this language, "who does Evert think that gave Lisa a gift" would be permissible, but not
*what does Evert think that Robert gave Lisa
or even
*what does Evert think that [gap] is the tastiest dish?
However,
who does Evert think gave Lisa a gift
who does Evert think received a gift from Robert
would both be permissible, however not necessarily
?who does Evert think Lisa got a gift from
?who does Evert think Robert gave a gift to
More interesting things could be done with regards to subjecthood, but it's late in the evening and I think this post introduces enough ideas already.
No comments:
Post a Comment