Ergative, accusative and Austronesian do not exist?

[Legion]

[Hallow XIII]

Congratulations. These papers have absolutely nothing to do with what you are claiming. They do, however, serve as solid evidence that you haven't the faintest idea of what you are talking about and even worse, have such a high opinion of yourself that you apparently cannot fathom that there are people here who do understand them and therefore know exactly that not only do these papers not at all claim that passives are transitive but that you are one of the greatest morons they have ever met. Shut up and go back to whence you crawled from.

[TehranHamburger]

Oh yeah, the mighty excuse, they claim EXACTLY what I am claiming and I was pointed to those papers from the thread on reddit by people where I posited the exact theory I'm positing here and they're basically saying 'Yeah, check this out, this guy posits pretty much the same thing.

Seriously, your arguments have ranged from ignoring key points to telling people to read vague things from ad hominems to psychoanalysis to posting pictures, none of which have been any-where on point to the topic. You seriously confuse me.

[Legion]

[Culla]

Well, I'm not theory independent and don't claim I am. I just claim, or rather want to know, if my theory is self consistent and can be used to explain and produce the English grammar.

Ultimately the categories of 'core verbal argument' like accusative and nominative do not make much sense to me. My own verbal 'theory' would call anything, nominative, accusative, prepositional phrase etc simply a 'verbal argument'. I'm just saying I see no real reason to say 'me' is a core verbal argument "accusative" of the transitive clause but "by me" is not the "ergative" is suppose of the intransitive clause.

I think we see the issue here in the second paragraph. OP is defining argument to be what they want it to be. OP is just being dishonest in this discussion and hasn't really put forward a consistent definition of what makes an argument and what doesn't and what tests you can use to find out what is an argument by their definition.

[gach]

As far as I know, both the subject and object can freely be dropped in Finnish, the verb even agrees with the dropped subject and conjugates in the zeroth person in Finnish.

Can you actually provide us any real examples so that people would be able to comment them? "As far as I know" isn't really any data for or against anything.

For example,

'minä olen tapettava sinusta'

is utter nonsense. If you really want to parse it as an approximation of something grammatical it would be something like "According to you, I'm killable", not a passive "I'm killed by you".

I'm not getting personal, but if you want to make wider conclusions that are not restricted to English you need to give us more examples and also check their validity.

[KathTheDragon]

Tehran, write out your entire argument summarised. Then we shall see if the papers support your argument.

By the way, some of their demonstrations in the second paper that some verbs don't have a passive is wrong, side they're leaving out the preposition, as in 'The solution appeals to me;*I am appealed (by the solution)', which ought to be 'The solution appeals to me;I am appealed to (by the solution)'.

[zompist]

The key question for you is "How do you idenfity the arguments for a verb in a given language?" The answer is not that if you find a feature used to mark an argument in language X, then every time that feature is used in any other language it marks an argument.

A core verbal argument to me satisfies the following criteria:

- There can only exist one of it. A verb cannot have two subjects, or two objects. But a verb can carry multiple instrumentals, allatives or locatives easily.

First, it's very sloppy to talk about "subjects" and "objects". These are not the same thing as agents and patients; if you don't know the difference you need to do more research.

Second, even if we interpret your claim to be about agents and patients instead, you provide no evidence and do nothing to explain what's going on in languages that show double nominatives or double accusatives.

Latin, for instance, has quite a few double accusatives-- e.g. mē augurem nōmināvērunt "they named me augur",
elementa eōs docēbat "he taught them the basics". Now one could of course decide that these involve different semantic roles, but you'd have to have a good reason to ignore the clear case behavior-- better than simply wishing to preserve your claim.

Ditransitives are another can of worms, though they're common enough that it's convenient to define a separate role (recipient) for them. But that makes most sense for language (like English and Latin) where recipients and patients have different syntactic behavior. It would seem unmotivated in languages like Panyjima where both simply appear in the accusative.

Thirdly, I'm not convinced that your criteria actually rules out oblique roles. Can you really assure us that every language with a locative allows multiple locatives? For that matter, what's the matter with saying e.g.

I was sent admonitory notes by the pastor, by my mother, by the school board.

You could analyze this as an implied conjunction, but again, you'd have to supply some argument why this is a better interpretation than simply allowing multiple constituents.

Finally, and really most importantly, what motivates this claim anyway? It just comes out of nowhere, with no apparent relationship to any issues in valence.

- The use of the marking is syntactic, not semantic, the syntactic information itself is carried by the verb. For instance saying 'I am loved by my mother', 'by' here carries no semantic information whatsoever, its use is purely syntactic to identify it as the agent of 'love', the verb itself carries the semantic.

This also sounds like special pleading. There are locatives that supply no information beyond the fact that a location is involved. And there are case markers that supply information beyond the case role (e.g. definiteness). The distinction between "semantic" and "syntactic" information is not that bright a line anyway-- it's a matter of grammaticalization, not loss of semantic information. Locatives very easily become case markers (or all sorts of other things); often, just like English "by", they continue in use as locatives as well.

[Radius Solis]

- The use of the marking is syntactic, not semantic, the syntactic information itself is carried by the verb. For instance saying 'I am loved by my mother', 'by' here carries no semantic information whatsoever, its use is purely syntactic to identify it as the agent of 'love', the verb itself carries the semantic.

This also sounds like special pleading. There are locatives that supply no information beyond the fact that a location is involved. And there are case markers that supply information beyond the case role (e.g. definiteness). The distinction between "semantic" and "syntactic" information is not that bright a line anyway-- it's a matter of grammaticalization, not loss of semantic information. Locatives very easily become case markers (or all sorts of other things); often, just like English "by", they continue in use as locatives as well.

I would also add that "by" has one or two oblique uses that are semantically indistinguishable from the passive "by":

This is a book by Tolstoy.

And then there's instrumental uses that aren't indistinguishable, but still very close kin:

I'll get there by car or by walking or by sheer force of will, but I'll get there.
I broke it by falling on it.

In all these uses, including the passive "by", the object of "by" is marked as having the same loose sense of being what allows something to happen or exist. Even the instrumental use easily bleeds together with the passive-agent use; try picking apart the semantics of "by" here:

This pyramid was built by placing stone atop stone.
This pyramid was built by slave labor.
This pyramid was built by Thutmose II.

Whatever differences there are between these are tiny compared to the difference they all have from This pyramid was built by the Nile.

[Kereb]

are there any examples of verbs in the passive in English that are ungrammatical without their "by"-phrase?

and if counting agents marked with "by" as core arguments disqualifies English passives as "true passives" or "truly intransitive", then where is an example from a language that DOES have "true" and "intransitive" passives? Would that require that they can't indicate the agent at all, even with a prepositional or other oblique phrase?

without counterexamples this discussion comes close to rendering terms like "intransitive" and "passive" meaningless, and so making the whole original assertion pointless as well

[Legion]

I have a couple suggestions to better this thread: lock it and move it to ephemera.

[clawgrip]

is there even a need to distinguish between agent and patient? They're clearly both just nouns.

[Zju]

What's that thing with the geese and chickens?

[linguoboy]

What's that thing with the geese and chickens?

A test of reading comprehension.

[Burke]

What's that thing with the geese and chickens?

A test of reading comprehension.

Damn, I thought it was a petting zoo...

I got excited too...

[zompist]

Radius, that's a great observation about "by".

The "by falling on it" example is also a great reminder that English, at least, has a whole slew of constructions that allow subclauses but aren't simple subordinated or relative clauses. (Quick, everybody decide how to translate "I broke it by falling on it" into your conlang.)

are there any examples of verbs in the passive in English that are ungrammatical without their "by"-phrase?

I don't think so, but this comes pretty close:

This book was written.

But the anomaly might be Gricean rather than grammatical.

[Ser]

This huge-ass book was written over just five days, can you believe it?

I think that kills the Gricean anomaly.

[zompist]

This huge-ass book was written over just five days, can you believe it?

I think that kills the Gricean anomaly.

No, because that's a different sentence.

But I should probably explain more. I think "This book was written" sounds odd because it doesn't provide any real information, so it's hard to think of a context where it would be felicitous. Your example provides extra information. So does an explicit by-clause: "This book was written by my grandmother." And a million other sentences: "...in Madrid", "...by candlelight", "...without the letter e", "...yesterday", "...hurriedly". The oddity is with the sentence without any additions.

[Qwynegold]

Gah, I thought you were saying that the Austronesian language family doesn't exist when I read the thread title.

Another weird case can be said to be Finnic languages which do not have a passive voice proper. They have technically a zeroth person which is used to communicate the same idea. Consider 'minut tapetaan' for 'I am being killed', literally '[something unspecified] kills me', note that 'minut' is still in the accusative case as in 'sinä tapat minut', (you kill me) or 'minut tapat sinä' (I am being killed by you). However they do have a passive participle and you can say 'minä olen tapettava sinusta', (I am being killed out of you) but this construction is rare and is not idiomatic as far as I know.

These two sentences are ungrammatical. There's no way to add an agent to minut tapetaan without changing the form of the verb. I would reconstruct both of those ungrammatical sentences as something like minä olen sinun tappama. (Although this particular sentence feels odd somehow. In some contexts it works better than in other, for example Mona Lisa on Da Vincin maalaama (Mona Lisa was painted by Da Vinci) is completely fine.)

[Sevly]

is there even a need to distinguish between agent and patient? They're clearly both just nouns.

• A New Syntax
  

[clawgrip]

exactly. Problem solved. We can lock the thread now.

[Chagen]

The "by falling on it" example is also a great reminder that English, at least, has a whole slew of constructions that allow subclauses but aren't simple subordinated or relative clauses. (Quick, everybody decide how to translate "I broke it by falling on it" into your conlang.)

I know you probably weren't serious but I'm REALLY bored so:

Am tan toçusya dera, zonis los.
in 3SGNEU fall-SUP CAUSE, be.PST-PTCPL break

[Xephyr]

This huge-ass book was written over just five days, can you believe it?

I think that kills the Gricean anomaly.

No, because that's a different sentence.

But I should probably explain more. I think "This book was written" sounds odd because it doesn't provide any real information, so it's hard to think of a context where it would be felicitous. Your example provides extra information. So does an explicit by-clause: "This book was written by my grandmother." And a million other sentences: "...in Madrid", "...by candlelight", "...without the letter e", "...yesterday", "...hurriedly". The oddity is with the sentence without any additions.

That's a far cry, a very very far cry, from saying it's ungrammatical. And before we resort to measuring sentences out by whether Mark Rosenfelder thinks they provide enough information to be felicitous in a given context*, there is this:

"It was decreed that there would be a book outlining the precepts so that the people might follow it and live righteously. The book was written, and copies were sent out by messengers carrying them to the far corners of the land."

And if you also want to say that that's "a different sentence" because it's coordinated with another then, 1) replace the comma with a period if you want, it makes no linguistic difference, and 2) well OF COURSE sentences rely on their surrounding sentences in order to be completely unambiguous-- that same fact is true of any other example sentence used to illustrate any grammatical point you're ever going to see. It's ridiculous to be expected to provide an entire paragraph to determine a single verb phrase's grammaticality.

* - Blah blah colorless ideas something something furious etc etc

[zompist]

You've forcefully rebutted something I didn't say, while completely failing to grasp what I did say. With added sarcasm to show how clever you are!

I already said this, but... if I say I think sentence X is anomalous, that does not mean that sentence-X-plus-any-crap-you-can-add-onto-it is also anomalous. Language is funny that way. .

If you don't know what Gricean means, go look it up rather than pretending I wrote something I didn't.

[Melteor]

This huge-ass book was written over just five days, can you believe it?

I think that kills the Gricean anomaly.

No, because that's a different sentence.

But I should probably explain more. I think "This book was written" sounds odd because it doesn't provide any real information, so it's hard to think of a context where it would be felicitous. Your example provides extra information. So does an explicit by-clause: "This book was written by my grandmother." And a million other sentences: "...in Madrid", "...by candlelight", "...without the letter e", "...yesterday", "...hurriedly". The oddity is with the sentence without any additions.

Other verbs are different, e.g. "This book was transcribed." "This book was illuminated." Not every book is illuminated, transcribed but all of them are written despite us having a prototypical example of writing in mind (I.e. written by hand.) It's trivially true. (I wonder if this isn't how certain classifiers show up, e.g. "written things".)