Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Detail #123: One idea for Alignment and Causatives

So, we know how coordination should  under syntactic ergativity:

girlerg slapped boyabs and fell
In syntactic ergativity, it is the boy that falls. In most ergative languages that also permit coordination, that is not the case, indicating they have a nominative-accusative syntax underlying the case marking. However, let's do some fun stuff with this and causatives.

We have two primary types of construction:
S O V 
S V 
Now, let's assume we're having a nom-acc language for now.
We get causative transformations thus:
C S O V
C O V
C S V
The C O V instance is obviously somewhat causative-passive, i.e. C causes someone to verb O. We would probably have marking along these lines:
Cnom Ssome case 1? Osome case 2? V
Cnom  Osome case 2? V
Cnom  Ssome case 1? V
It is possible S is marked as some kind of non-object,  and 1 and 2 might reasonably be the same. Let's now consider what happens when we have coordinate this with some other verb. Remember, non-causatives here coordinate like in English: Snom Oacc V1 and V2 means Snom did V1 and V2, regardless of transitivity of V2.
 Cnom Ssome case 1? felled and fell
 This could easily be a way of marking telicity of causatives! However, let's look at the other situation
 Cnom Scase 1 Ocase 2 V1,trans and V2,intr
 Johnnom made Ericcase 1 paint the housecase 2 and turned red : the house turned red (due to S1's painting it)
 Cnom Ocase 2 V1,trans and V2,intr
 Cnom made the house be painted and turned red: the house turned red (due to C's making people paint it)
We do get this kind of situation though: 
 Cnom Scase 1 O1,case 2 V1,trans and O2,acc V2,trans 
in pseudo-English with SVO order instead: 
 Johnnom made Ericcase 1 paint the housecase 2 and spilled the paintacc

This could reasonably go both ways:  Johnnom or Ericcase 1 could both be the subjects of V2,trans from a purely a posteriori viewpoint. We could leave such a thing ambiguous, or we could restrict it to either of the two, or we could have some peculiar semantically empty 'pseudo-voice' that is used to resolve this, i.e. a 'decausative voice' that is used exclusively to coordinate your regular verbs with a causer, or maybe the other way around. We also have the situation where we may want to coordinate an intransitive verb with either the C or S argument. We could also have the case marking on S1 depend on whether we want it to be the subject of an embedded verb - maybe shifting it rightwards or marking it as nominative if we are going to coordinate with it?

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