Search results for 'tag:Constructions tag:Accusative' matching tags 'Constructions' and 'Accusative'

Re: nominative and objective pronouns.......confusing!

Huevos — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:58:34 GMT

Avangi
What might the implied verb be?

Avangi, I don't want to get into that with this sentence. For the reason why, read my point to Raen below. "Like" is a preposition so follows that rule.

But to give you an idea what I mean about implied verb...

She is taller than me.
She is taller than I am.

Some people say "She is taller than I" but my recommendation is to leave that construction for the pretentious and supercilious, (maybe I'm just too much of an Alfred P. Doolittle to use it).

Raen
So it's always "between you and me" no matter where this expression sits in a sentence?

"Between" is a preposition. Pronouns that follow prepositions are always in the accusative case, not nominative. It's a rule, not a matter of opinion. Here are some examples that wrongly use the nominative.

He wrote a book about she.

The girl passed between he and I.

The bullet passed through he.

The waiter spilt orange juice on she.

Everyone caught the train except I.

Their father ordered the meal for they.

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think.

I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me.

First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and how you frame your terms. To me, ergativity in English is primarily a side topic to voice, and the only "marked" voice in English is the passive. All others rely on semantics and indirect evidence (such as your very detailled and useful post about the transitivity system in English). BUT: how do you frame the evidence there is systematically? In syntax? Make it part of the lexicon? In other words, what exactly is it that the term "ergative" adds to a combination of transitivity and lexical tagging? I'm still thinking about your suggestion to speak of "ergative structures" rather than "ergative verbs". This is an interesting approach, de-emphasising the lexicon in that respect; but I'm trying to ignore it for this post, mostly because I'm not done thinking it through.

Second, I think I've used the term "semantic" very loosely in my other post. There's reference, and then there's cognitive framing. (Or content and point of view.) The cognitive framing is harder to get at and interpret, mostly because these things aren't always immediately visible. We're talking about "ergative structures" in English, or the "middle voice", because we've noticed these constructions in other languages (Basque for ergativity; Ancient Greek for Middle voice; etc.). That is we have to strip away the structure and get down to the point-of-view meaning that the structures imply. And then we have to go back to English and look for expressions of said point-of-view meaning in this language. (Something similar is going on when linguists are probing "shall/will" along the lines of futurity/modality, within the discussion whether English has a future tense or not. The consensus is it doesn't, but the discussion - assuming "will/shall" as tense-modals - has been productive, if not conclusive.) But the thing is this: if you're bringing concepts to a language from outside (which is usual in comparative linguistics) you need an anchor; conventional structural methods - such as your "what syntactic operations yield well-formed usage?" approach - have their limitations. So do semantic (referential or framing). This makes ergativity/unaccusativity hard to think about, before you choose your approach.

Examples follow:

This is about the sentence, "He died a cruel death."

MrPedantic
The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

I agree that, framing-wise, the object functions much like an adverbial. But it's an "object" in syntax, which has implications that are incompatible with adverbials. Most relevant, here, "die" is now prone to passivisation.

"A cruel death was died," does sound odd (I'll get to it in a minute), but I wouldn't bat an eyelid at "Many deaths were died that night." Interestingly, it's hard to put this into the active voice, mostly because no subject seems appropriate. (?"The Soldiers died many deaths that night."; ?"The army died many deaths that night."...). To me, all the examples I can think of (plural nouns, collective nouns...) don't express the passive meaning. The closest I come is "Many people died that night." Anything else I can think of is of questionable grammaticality.

However, "A cruel death was died," although it sounds odd, doesn't sound ungrammatical in the least (at least not to me). It's also not a semantic problem; I understand the sentence perfectly well, both reference- and framingwise.

The reason, I think, this sounds odd is a pragmatic one. I think this one sounds odd because it's hard to find a context for this utterance that justifies the passive, which is a "marked construction". You generally expect "marked" constructions to be there for a reason. I suspect in the right context the above sentence would be perfectly fine. (It's a matter of Grice's conversational maxims, the maxim of manner, in particular.)

This is where the "frame-semantics" of syntactic constructions become complicated, I think. How do language structures tie in with cognitive structures (e.g. To what extent do we buy the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?)

So, from this I go to self-observation:

MrPedantic
and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

See, I had the hardest time even to grasp what that meant, not now in this thread, but when I first discovered the distinction. That's because, learning English, I didn't train to see the difference. It wasn't necessary, as ergativity/unaccusativity isn't expressed through syntactic structures, but only indirectly through what operations are possible on the verb; this I pretty much took care off either through lexical list-tagging, or through collocation. If there is a hidden logic to it that I applied in learning, it never became conscious. (It's quite possible that I had a practical knowledge, but no discoursive one of this subject; but why, then, is it so hard to grasp?)

If we go back to the list and sift through the operations there, we'll find that "die" behaves different from "break" in the way we specified. But here's the catch: to apply that structural method, we have to assume that "break" in 5.a = "break" in 5.b = "break" in 5.c etc.; i.e. that "break" is the same lexical item in all these instances. That's because syntax has a hard time to differentiate between "signifier" and "signified", or "sign" and "concept".

Notice, for example, how your 5.a is already the transitive, while systematically it should be the intransitive agentive: 5.a *He broke. (i.e. "He caused/performed the action of breaking." as opposed to "He underwent the process of breaking," which is 5.b, now, and would be 5.c)

So I'd amend this, to:

5a. *He broke.

5b. He broke the plate

5c. The plate broke.

5d. The plate was broken.

5e. The broken plate

5f. The plate broke easily

And the comparison with "die" would be two-fold:

1. = sign; 2. = concept

5.1a He died.

5.2a He killed.

5.1b *He died the man.

5.2b He killed the man

5.1c The man died.

5.2c *The man killed.

5.1d *The man was died.

5.2d The man was killed.

5.1e *The died man [cf. The dead man.]

5.2e The killed man.

5.1f The man died easily. (<-- What's the difference to 5.1a? Should I add an * before it, as this is out of place, here?)

5.2f *The man killed easily. (<-- Is this not available, because 5.1f is available?)

5.1a, 5.1c, and 5.1f seem to be much the same. And this is the problem I have systematising a structural comparison. One possibility, I see is to re-cast 5a as reflexive 1. *He died himself./2. He killed himself. I might try to justify this through dying being a process you undergo, thus if you add an agentive/causative to core meaning (which is not in slot a, but in slot c) the verb becomes by necessity reflexive ("He caused himself to die.")

But these things are all a bit... tentative. I fear it's more rationalised than rational, if you get my drift.

[Interesting aside: you used the term "anticausative" alongside "ergative" and "unaccusative" for break in your thread. Bears repeating, as it's something I'm also still thinking about; a very interesting concept I haven't come across yet.]

MrPedantic
But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Now, that's an interesting observation. I'd argue that the semantic difference is not referential (it refers to the same state of affairs), but it's a framing difference. If we view the sign as a proxy for the agent, we're importing the difference of active vs. voice into a construction that's free of the syntactic properties that normally accompany this framing device in English. "Reads," then, is ergative, while "says is a straightforward accusative verb (one that takes the accusative (which isn't marked in English - except, perhaps, for pronouns, where it's indistinguishable - morphologically - from the dative; the conventional term would be "direct object").

MrPedantic
Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative.

That's what makes language so fascinating, isn't it? Nice example, there, too.

Re: the middle voice option

MrPedantic — Sun, 25 May 2008 22:49:37 GMT

Hello Dawnstorm,

Dawnstorm

In most of these sentences you could make a case for elided objects, that are taken care off by context (rather than considered irrelevant, as in "I am eating."):

e.g. Yes, I saw X. X = anaphoric; referring to "Did you see X!" or "Omg, X!"

"You push X and I'll lift X." : X is exophoric; determined by a present or imagined contex (e.g. they're standing in front of X).

Yes, I agree; such cases could presumably be classified as "common ambitransitives" (see ex. 4a in my earlier post); or perhaps as "ambiguous ambitransitives" (see ex. 6); thus:

1. You push (it) and I'll lift (it)

But:

2. It lifted quite easily

Dawnstorm

"What should we do when we punish X?" This one's actually more like the "considering irrelevant" I mentioned above, the assumption being that there is one set of answers for all X, so that X doesn't have to be mentioned. (Similarly, "I am eating X," the point I'm making holds for all X.) Note that the listener might enquire, here, "punish who?" or "eat what?"

"Please give X generously.": Here, X usually means "money", but context probably takes care of this (it might mean used clothes, household appliances etc. for flood victims). Here X is not so much irrelevant as implied.

Again, agreed. Presumably therefore "common ambitransitives".

Dawnstorm

I've heard that cognitive linguists often work with an implied object for many "intranstives". So: "I am reading" and "I am eating" always have a hint of "I am reading X" and "I am eating X", which is not expressed. A lot of this has to do with "theta roles"; what parts the verb's arguments are playing.

I am eating (X): Subject = agent

I am dying: Subject = experiencer

***

Yes, agreed. "Eat" is presumably unergative (ex. 4); "die", unaccusative (ex. 2).

I also agree with your inverted commas ("intransitives"), for verbs such as "eat" and "read". In non-metaphorical usage, the objects of "eat" tend to belong to a particular class ("food"), and are therefore to some extent always cognate with "eat"; whereas the objects of e.g. "hit" are not.

Thus "He eats well" does not need a context, for us to understand what the implied object is; but "He hits well" does.

Dawnstorm

Notice, for example, the semantic equivalence, but syntactic difference between:

- The sign reads, "Beware of the dog!"

- The sign says, "Beware of the dog!"

I agree that there's a syntactic difference: the first can't be presented as indirect speech, for example. "Reads" has almost a copulative sense here.

But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Dawnstorm

This is the gordian knot that tangles up syntax, semantics and pragmatics. There are a lot of problems:
- The mirror is breaking.
I am dying.

vs.

- Don't break the mirror!
- Don't kill me.

See the problem? It's not only a syntactic but also a lexical problem. Break (intr.):Die (intr.) = Break (tr.):Kill (tr.). Does it make sense to claim that "break" is ergative/unaccusative (I'm still confused by the difference) and "die" isn't, because "die" selects a different lexical item for the transitive?

No, it doesn't make sense; and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

Dawnstorm

But, again, syntax is not the same as semantics. Take this construction, for example:

"He died a cruel death."

While this assigns subject and object along the formal transitive model, semantically the "agent/patient" distinction breaks down; or rather, the fact that dying is not an action that affects death posits a problem to the "agent/patient" distinction within "voice".

The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

Dawnstorm

I'm not surprised people run from "ergativity"/"accusativity"; it's a tangle. I don't think that conventional morphological/syntactic analysis can solve the tangle adequately. It's a gordian knot, and all the syntanctician has is Alexander's sword. I'd look for solution in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, frame semantics etc. These approaches could then help patch holes in syntax.

The terminology is not happy, admittedly; "middle voice" and "ergative" belong to other linguistic contexts, as has been mentioned; but I think it can be disentangled.

It may be the case that "ergative" usage was once much more common in English. Before the rise of the passive present progressive, for instance, an active present progressive often expressed the same meaning. Thus:

3. The house is building (pre-19th century) =
4. The house is being built

Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative. For instance, last week I heard a sports commentator say:

5. The pitch doesn't look very pretty; but as long as it plays well, that's all that matters.

Best wishes,

MrP

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:05:09 GMT

MrPedantic
1. Yes, I saw.
2. You push and I'll lift.
3. What should we do when we punish?
4. Please give generously.

The problem I see here is a muddle of syntax, pragmatics and semantics.

In most of these sentences you could make a case for elided objects, that are taken care off by context (rather than considered irrelevant, as in "I am eating."):

e.g. Yes, I saw X. X = anaphoric; referring to "Did you see X!" or "Omg, X!"

"You push X and I'll lift X." : X is exophoric; determined by a present or imagined contex (e.g. they're standing in front of X).

"What should we do when we punish X?" This one's actually more like the "considering irrelevant" I mentioned above, the assumption being that there is one set of answers for all X, so that X doesn't have to be mentioned. (Similarly, "I am eating X," the point I'm making holds for all X.) Note that the listener might enquire, here, "punish who?" or "eat what?"

"Please give X generously.": Here, X usually means "money", but context probably takes care of this (it might mean used clothes, household appliances etc. for flood victims). Here X is not so much irrelevant as implied.

I've heard that cognitive linguists often work with an implied object for many "intranstives". So: "I am reading" and "I am eating" always have a hint of "I am reading X" and "I am eating X", which is not expressed. A lot of this has to do with "theta roles"; what parts the verb's arguments are playing.

I am eating (X): Subject = agent

I am dying: Subject = experiencer

***

I read the sign: Subject = agent; Object = patient.

The sign is read: Subject = patient;

The sign reads, "Beware of the Dog!": Subject = ? It's not, strictly speaking, a patient, as the sign isn't affected by the mental act of reading. (This is different from "The food cooks on the oven," as the food undergoes a physical change - so that the "food" can be said to be an experiencer.) Actually, what we have here is an "attribute" of the book.

Notice, for example, the semantic equivalence, but syntactic difference between:

- The sign reads, "Beware of the dog!"

- The sign says, "Beware of the dog!"

This is the gordian knot that tangles up syntax, semantics and pragmatics. There are a lot of problems:

- The mirror is breaking.

- I am dying.

vs.

- Don't break the mirror!

- Don't kill me.

See the problem? It's not only a syntactic but also a lexical problem. Break (intr.):Die (intr.) = Break (tr.):Kill (tr.). Does it make sense to claim that "break" is ergative/unaccusative (I'm still confused by the difference) and "die" isn't, because "die" selects a different lexical item for the transitive? Or should we, perhaps, split the lexical item "break" in two?

Personally, I find comparing "break" (intr.) with "break" (tr.) but not "die" (intr.) with "kill" (tr.) to be imprecise.

But, again, syntax is not the same as semantics. Take this construction, for example:

"He died a cruel death."

While this assigns subject and object along the formal transitive model, semantically the "agent/patient" distinction breaks down; or rather, the fact that dying is not an action that affects death posits a problem to the "agent/patient" distinction within "voice".

I'm not surprised people run from "ergativity"/"accusativity"; it's a tangle. I don't think that conventional morphological/syntactic analysis can solve the tangle adequately. It's a gordian knot, and all the syntanctician has is Alexander's sword. I'd look for solution in cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, frame semantics etc. These approaches could then help patch holes in syntax.

Re: The book sold ...

CalifJim — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:37:31 GMT

Any more?

I honestly don't know. The book isn't organized that way. My comments were based on a few of her interspersed remarks, references, and footnotes throughout the book. The book is basically a list of verbs classified into groups on the basis of which transformations they can take, for example "Verbs of Combining and Attaching", "Verbs of Preparing", "Verbs of Appearance and Disappearance", "Verbs of Assessment", "Verbs of Communication".

The book is poorly indexed, unless you want to look up a specific verb, but I did find this remark in the section on Passive Alternations:

"It has also been proposed by Perlmutter and Postal (1984) that only unergative verbs (those intransitive verbs whose surface subject is an underlying subject) and not unaccusative verbs (those intransitive verbs whose surface subject is an underlying object) are found in prepositional passives. But not all supposedly unergative verbs allow prepositional passives; these restrictions must be explained."

Some examples precede this discussion:

George Washington slept in this bed. (unergative verb)
This bed was slept in by George Washington.

A pirate ship appeared on the horizon. (unaccusative verb)
*The horizon was appeared on by a pirate ship.

According to these definitions I take it that the deep structure of the unaccusative structure above is thought to be:

(null subject) appeared a pirate ship (=object)

And if die is unaccusative, the deep structure of Mr. Smith died is something like

(null subject) die (+ past tense marker) Mr. Smith (=object)

It's too much for my brain just now, and I haven't got the time nor the inclination to pursue it in any greater detail at this time!

CJ

P.S. Levin doesn't use the term "middle voice", though I may have slipped and used it above. She carefully avoids that, preferring the term "middle construction".

Re: The book sold ...

CalifJim — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 01:48:13 GMT

Beth Levin (English Verb Class and Alternations) calls this the middle construction.

She mentions another construction -- alternation between causative and inchoative -- with the notation that another name for this one is "ergative". She lists "sell" as impossible in the ergative construction. The requirement for an adverb seems to be crucial in disambiguating the two classes in some cases. Thus, in her opinion at least,

I broke the cup.
The cup broke. (break can be ergative.) (meaning: the cup became broken)

I sold the book.
*The book sold. (sell can't be ergative.) (meaning: the book became sold)

The book sold (very) well. (sell can be used in the middle construction)

There is a great deal of confusion in this area, with different authors defining these terms differently: middle voice, ergative, unaccusative. I avoid them all whenever possible!

CJ

Re: Why put "to" in passive?

paco2004 — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 21:52:51 GMT

Hello guys

Thank you for the replies. All of them are very helpful to me in thinking the problem. I think I had better explain the question more in detail.

Actually the questioner asked at first the semantic difference between "He made her sing" and "He told her to sing". So, at first I explained to the questioner like as follows:

To my knowledge, the difference comes from Old English where they used verbal infinitives in accusative form (which correspond to bare infinitives in modern English) as well as ones in dative form (which correspond to to-infinitives in modern English). So the "sing" in "He made her sing" is taken to carry a sense of accusative case, and as the consequence the sentence can be parsed as "He made her-sing", which means, "her-sing" is an inseparable objective of the verb "make". In contrast, the "to sing" in "He told her to sing" carries a sense of old dative infinitives which were used to mean "towards the said action or activity". In this case, "her" and "to sing" are separable entities, and "to sing" can be taken as a complement of the verbal "tell her" as known from the fact we can say "He told her so" by replacing "to sing" with "so".

This was the first reply I made to the question. Then he (or might be she) asked as follows. "If 'her sing" in the 'made' using construction is really an inseparable entity, why can we make a passive sentence like 'She was made to sing' and why is 'to' inserted in this case?" With this question, I lost for an answer. If my theory is right, it should be impossible to make a passive sentence for "He made her sing".

I feel Endi's reply might contain some clues. I have believed "He made her sing" and "She was made to sing" are the same in the meaning. But I am beginning to feel you native speakers might take them as subtly different in the sense. The active version clearly implies "She actually sang", but how about the passive version? Is it possible to say like "She was made to sing, but she didn't"?

paco

Re: Where is the direct object...

Randy_Tam — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:37:02 GMT

.... -0-

ok, let's put it this way: GB is nothing more than a module in the generative grammar, to be put on a par with such other modules of the theory as X', Case theory or the Theta Theory, although it has been quite incorrectly treated as though it were the whole of the Grammar (Chomsky, 1995b, p.30).

The sentence I believe can be interpreted this way:

1. There is an x such that x is subject to the action of 'training' such that x is intended to carry out the action of 'killing'.

Where X = the agents

According to the generative grammar, this clause involves, as usual, quite complicated and interwoven elements in action: 1. ECM 2. Move A (Alpha...) 3. Passive morphology (EST)

(i) The agents are (for the sake of simplicity, I omit the irrelevant Past tense here) trained to kill

can be interpreted as having the underlying structure of:

(ii) e train [Passive+, Present, Agr pl+] TP[DP SPEC [the agents] T'[T[to] VP[V[kill]]]]

As passive morphology makes the Verb assign no theta role to the Subject, such a sentence as:

* The Agency are trained the agents to kill.

is ungrammatical. However, on the other hand, as the Projection Principle mandates that every Agr P must have a Subject, a construction like:

* e are trained the agents to kill.

is impossible as well. Therefore, Experiencer NP 'the agents' moves to fill the Subject role (note that expletives are used as a last resort ---> in its ordinary sense, bringing no syntactic import: if there is any candidate eligible for filling the Subject A position, then that candidate will be used instead of expletives, such that *there / it are trained the agents to kill is ungrammatical)

There's still the TP left to discussion: as there's no Agr present, the TP does not assign Case to its SPEC. It is the Verb 'train', which governs the TP, that assigns Accusative to that DP. (as governor governs SPEC of the branch as well)

Re: eragative or middle.

milky — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:35:14 GMT

Fajita (1996) says that 1) is unaccusative/ergative and 2) is a middle construction:

1) The suitcase easily opens up. (No Agent)

2) The suitcase opens up easily. (Implied Agent)

Do you agree?

Re: Use of article "the" with places

paco2004 — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 11:31:48 GMT

Hello Anon

I'm a mere English learner from Japan and my role here is rather an asker than an answerer. But if you don't mind, I'd like you to read my ideas about your question.

I take "school" in "go to school" or "church" in "go to church" as an uncountable noun. As you suggested, "school" or "church" in such usage means the activities that would take place in any physical institutions called "schools" or "churches". On the other hand, "bank" in "go to the bank" and "store" in "go to the grocery store" are countable nouns and they are names of physically existent substances (=houses). Why are they modified with THE? I suppose it is because when these expressions were born, there existed only one bank or one grocery store in the area in which common English speakers spent their time every day. Because of this uniqueness, I suppose, saying "go to the bank or the grocery store" should have been more natural to them than saying "go to a bank or a grocery store", when they talked with people living in the same area.

"Hospital" in "be in hospital" or "go to hospital" in British English might be similar to "school" in "go to school" in that the noun means an abstract notion - receiving some medical treatment in this case. Why do you Americans say "the hospital" instead of mere "hospital"? As to this question, a linguist suggests that the use of THE in American English might have come from that the Irish people who immigrated to the United States were hyperconscious about using THE. The Irish people those days were excellent speakers of English because English proficiency was the only means with which they could escape from the Great Famine, but still THE was a thing tough for them to use correctly because their mother tongue Gaelic lacks the word equivalent to English THE. So told the linguist (click here).

Regarding your last question, the phrase "go home" originated in Old English where every nouns retained cases. There some nouns in accusative case were used often as a directional adverb. "Home" in "go home" is a relic of such usage of "home" in accusative case as an adverbial. About this, the Oxford English Dictionary tells as follows.
The accusative "home" retains its original use after a verb of motion, as in "to go or come home" (= L. ire, venire domum); but as this construction is otherwise obsolete in the language, "home" so used is treated practically as an adverb, and has developed purely adverbial uses.

paco