Search results for 'tag:Direct objects tag:Accusative' matching tags 'Direct objects' and 'Accusative'

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: About the meaning of "where"

Velimir — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:11:58 GMT

I'll try to give some information on this as a non-professional.This is how it looks like in the serbian language,and I suppose,it is very similar in all other slavic languages and also the latin language.

For indicating a location the locative case of a noun is used.If the english language had similar declension of nouns then the nouns following the prepositions "in" and "at" would be in the locative case.The presence of the preceding preposition is obligatory when the noun is in the locative case.

But,if the verb indicates motion,or in plain english,if you are :
going to, flying to, traveling to..

like in the question given in the opening post,then the noun will be in the dative case.This case you can connect with the nouns following the preposition "to" although the preposition is not necessarily present.The word "dative" derives from latin "dare" which means "to give" and the usage is most obvious on the example of that verb:

I gave my girlfriend a flower.

If you translated this in serbian,"girlfriend" would be in the dative case.Indirect object is in the dative case.The direct object ("a flower") is in the accusative case.

"Cases play a major part in determining a noun's syntactic role in the sentence, so word order is not as important in Latin as it is in other languages, such as English. Because of noun cases, words can often be moved around in a sentence without significantly altering its meaning, though the emphasis will have altered" (from a Wikipedia article on the latin language)
Btw,changing nouns,adjectives,pronouns and numbers to different cases is pretty tough area of the language with more cases,and is often lifelong mistery for many natives,and I know that well.Luckily,english is not a case-sensitive language.

Best regards

Re: "Than me" versus "than I am"

Lovek323 — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:18:27 GMT

Than ought to be used as either a demonstrative pronoun or a conjunction. In the sentence 'Jessica is prettier than me', it is being used as a conjunction. This conjunction usually occurs after a comparative adjective or adverb. In this case, it occurs after better, which is a comparative adjective. Conjunctions join two clauses and a clause must have a verb, thus the second clause, which is simply 'me', must have an implied verb. The implied verb is the copular and, when included, the sentence reads thus: 'Jessica is prettier than is me'.

The inclusion of the missing verb causes most English speakers to see the problem instantly: the accusative (objective) case of the pronoun is used when the nominative (subjective) case ought to be used. The copular does not follow the same rules as most other verbs in that it does not take a noun in the accusative case as its direct object. In fact, the direct object of the copular verb ought to be in the nominative case. Hence, our sentence ought to be: 'Jessica is pretter than I am', which is commonly reduced to: 'Jessica is pretter than I'.

'Who is it? It is me.'
Ought to be I.

I reject the conclusion that 'Jessica is prettier than me' is the better choice. It is, perhaps, the more common choice in informal contexts such as speech or informal writing. It is my opinion that, even in informal contexts, one ought to strive to be as correct as possible.

Re: Which way would you sway?

MrPedantic — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:08:15 GMT

Milky wrote:

<I would be interested to see quotations from the early English grammarians that presented spoken English as somehow inferior, or that demonstrated an imposition of inappropriate rules from Latin. >

Do you doubt that was the case?

"Doubt" is too strong a word. I would be interested to see the quotations.

If so, I guess you disagree with this:

"If they have studied "English Grammar", this is probably an encumbrance which they might well put aside for the present, since it is based on a more or less imitative recapitulation of Classical Latin Grammar, which is totally non-applicable to the English language as it now stands.

I would disagree that Classical Latin Grammar is "totally non-applicable" to the English language (or vice versa). It would be truer to say that many aspects of Latin grammar are non-applicable to English.

I would also disagree with the notion that the study of English grammar for any given person is bound to have been based on Latin grammar; though no doubt the statement is true for some people.

[Lowth] condemned "forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language"¹).

Sounds sensible.

His most famous (or infamous) contribution to the study of grammar was his prescription that sentences ending with a prepositionâsuch as "what did you ask for?"âare inappropriate in formal writing.

Sounds doubtful. Though Lowth doesn't appear to mention Latin in his reasoning:

"This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style."

And he seems to limit his prescription to the "solemn and elevated Style", which is a relatively rare form of English.

Thus Lowth condemns Addison's sentence "Who should I meet the other night, but my old friend?" on the grounds that the thing acted upon should be in the "Objective Case" (corresponding, as he says earlier, to an oblique case in Latin), rather than taking this example and others as evidence from noted writers that "who" can refer to direct objects.

I would not agree with Lowth about Addison's sentence; but nothing here suggests that his justification lay in Latin grammar.

"Objective case" doesn't seem a particularly pernicious phrase; "whom" is undeniably an example; and what remains of the objective case in English "corresponds" in some of its functions to the accusative case in Latin.

I know that some popular sources repeat the notion that early English grammarians attempted to impose Latin grammar on English; but I've yet to see any primary evidence.

MrP

Re: Help with nominative-accusative case.

Marvin A. — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 17:13:02 GMT

>> My problem (took me long enough, didn't it?) is that English is described as having a vestigial normative-accusative case in its use of pronouns and passive voice but I don't see it. Can someone explain how normative-accusative applies to the English language?   <<

I think they're just trying to say that although English doesn't inflect (change the form of) regular nouns in the nominative and accusative case, like for example, Greek or Latin, it still does with pronouns.

For example: in Latin the sentence "The boy loves the girl" would be: "Puer puellam amat"
Puer = boy. Nominative case (in the accusative case it would be "puerum")
Puellam = girl. Accusative case. (Direct object). (in the nominative case it would be "puella")

But to say, "The girl loves the boy" would be "Puerum puella amat".

Notice that it was not necessary to change the order of the words in Latin, because it was clear who was the subject and who was the object, based on the *form* of the word. The nominative form looks and sounds different from the accusative form (w/a few exceptions) in Latin.

The same was true for Old English. For example, the word for "name" in Old English (e.g. how English was spoken 1000 years ago) was "nama". In the accusative, it was "naman". So, English use to change the form of the word to show how it was used in a sentence.

Modern English generally doesn't have many cases any more. For regular nouns there are only two. One case that functions as the nominative, accusative, and dative, and the other case functions as the genitive.

Thus: the word thing:

Standard case: thing   things
Genetive case: thing's   things'

The appostrophe s comes from Middle English -es, thus the apostrophe means that the "e" was left out.

But...English still shows a clear distinction with pronouns in the nominative and the accusative/dative

Thus:
Nominative: He
Accusative/Dative: Him
Genitive: His

the word "you" use to also have a distinction: the nominative case was "ye", and the accusative was "you". The genitive is still "your". The first person sg. pronoun still retains the distinction: I vs me vs my. So in essence, by saying "you are good" is the equivalent of saying "Me am good" because "ye" used to be used as the subject: thus "ye are good."

That's why we have a "vestige" of a nominative-accusative/dative distinction left over.

Re: Help with nominative-accusative case.

Teardrop — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:46:02 GMT

M. Caliban,

The nominative and the accusative cases are the cases of the noun that is checked by the verb. Nominative case means that the noun is in the nominal form (can occupy the position of a subject). Accusative case is the objective case.

1a. He helps the girl.

b.* Him helps the girl.

2a. The boy helps him.

b.* The boy helps he.

*: the sentence is ungrammatical.

As you see, 1a is grammatical because the subject of the verb "helps" is in the nominative case. However, 1b is ungrammatical because the subject is in the objective (accusative) case that can never occupy the position of a subject.

Also, 2a is grammatical because the direct object of the transitive verb "helps is in the accusative case. However, 2b is ungrammatical because the direct object is in the accusative (objective) case.

Is that helpful?

Help with nominative-accusative case.

M. Caliban — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 13:59:05 GMT

Although I'm a native English speaker, I've often struggled to understand English grammar, especially its morphosyntatical elements. I've done some reading on nominative-accusative as well as ergative-absolutive cases and I just don't get it.

Can someone who's better at linguistics explain this to me?

I understand that a sentence has a Subject, a Verb, and an Object. (John sees fish) I understand that a verb can be transitive, in that it demands both subject and object, or intransitive, in that it won't accept an object.

For example, 'to see' is transitive in that John (the subject) has to see something (the direct object), he can't 'just see.' On the other hand, 'to sleep' is intransitive in that John can 'just sleep' but he can't sleep a direct object.

1a: John sees fish.

1b: John sees.

2a: John sleeps fish

2b: John sleeps.

Therefore, 1a and 2b are right. 2a is never right and 1b is only right if you want to interpret it as actually saying, "John does see."

As I understand it, nominative-accusative case is when a language 'marks' the direct object of a transitive verb. So, if my mark was '-do' then I could say:

1. John sees fish.

2. John fish-do sees.

3. Fish-do sees John.

4. Sees fish-do John.

And all of them would mean the same thing. Word order doesn't matter now as no matter where I scatter the word fish the -do tells me what its function in the sentence is.

My problem (took me long enough, didn't it?) is that English is described as having a vestigial normative-accusative case in its use of pronouns and passive voice but I don't see it. Can someone explain how normative-accusative applies to the English language?

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: Direct Object Restriction

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 21:38:35 GMT

Instead of saying that these be the 'underlying direct object', or making the distinction between D / S structure, or an 'unaccusative verb' (presumably defined as a Verb that cannot take an Object, which is, par excellence, of accusative case [abstract case]), I think it will be useful here to talk of the Subject being an 'Experiencer' --- the entity that experiences some (psychological) state expressed by the Predicate (the Verb) (p49, Haegeman, 1996). This may sound more palatable as a definition anyway.

BTW, it is an interesting thing to observe that most such verbs are actually ergative (ie. they are either transitive or intransitive: try with passives)

Direct Object Restriction

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 01:15:53 GMT

Hello, I'm a NNES who has just completed the AEC in ESL.

I recently did a bit of reading on unaccusative verbs, as I have been most confused by discussions around this recently and here).

I've read something about Direct Object Restriction. It says that "the surface subject of an unaccusative verb is the underlying direct object."

It gave these examples.

a. The pond froze solid.

b. The butter melted to a liquid.

c. The glass broke into little pieces.

d. The gate swung shut.

e. This time the curtain rolled open on the court of the Caesars . . .

So, as I understand it, subjects can sometimes be objects, but still remain in the subject position in the sentence. Is that right?

Above something swang the gate shut, didn't it. So the thing was the doer and the gate the object, right?

It's a bit complex, but I think I understand it.

Search results for 'tag:Direct objects tag:Accusative' matching tags 'Direct objects' and 'Accusative'

Re: the middle voice option

Re: About the meaning of &quot;where&quot;

Re: "Than me" versus "than I am"

Re: Which way would you sway?

Re: Help with nominative-accusative case.

Re: Help with nominative-accusative case.

Help with nominative-accusative case.

Re: Where is the direct object...

Re: Direct Object Restriction

Direct Object Restriction

Re: About the meaning of "where"