Search results for 'tag:Expressions tag:Accusative' matching tags 'Expressions' 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 "on" before date or day

Cool Breeze — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:00:30 GMT

The preposition is indeed sometimes dropped before the days of the week in newspapers: He will arrive in Cairo [on] Wednesday. The resultant Wednesday becomes what in some other languages is called an accusative of time. Dropping the preposition is also fairly common in informal style, which has led some people to think that dropping the preposition isn't as good English as having it in the expression.

However, it is wise to use discretion in leaving out the preposition. If omitting the preposition is liable to cause confusion or misunderstanding, don't drop it.

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: Why is "me" but not "I"?

Tanit — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:27:31 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:

The parallel "accusative of exclamation" in Latin is sometimes explained as an ellipsis where the verb has disappeared. Thus "me miserum!" (lit. "me wretched!") might be a remnant of "(pu-to) me miserum!" (lit. "I think me wretched!").

Perhaps English expressions such as "Lucky him!", "Poor her!", etc. are also remnants of longer phrases (though I can't think of a likely "original").

MrP

Thank you for sharing your opinion and answering my question about "poor me."
In Italian we use the same structure, so I find your explanation particularly interesting.

Re: Why is "me" but not "I"?

MrPedantic — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 23:48:38 GMT

Doll wrote:
...poor me...

The parallel "accusative of exclamation" in Latin is sometimes explained as an ellipsis where the verb has disappeared. Thus "me miserum!"Â¹ (lit. "me wretched!") might be a remnant of "(***) me miserum!" (lit. "I think me wretched!").

Perhaps English expressions such as "Lucky him!", "Poor her!", etc. are also remnants of longer phrases (though I can't think of a likely "original").

MrP

Â¹ cf. Milton's Paradise Lost, Book IV, which also includes an interesting use of "myself":

Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

Re: Why is "me" but not "I"?

Wanwo — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:13:04 GMT

'The Prince and Me' - Gramatically it's not correct but it's a movie title. Liberties can be taken with grammar for art's sake.

Likewise, 'silly me' is an expression that is not correct grammatically. It would be grammatically correct to say 'I am silly.' but 'silly me' is a lot more common.

You might have heard 'Fool me' from the expression 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.' But what this is really saying is 'If you fool me once, shame on you. If you fool me twice, shame on me.' It's grammatically correct to say 'You fooled me.' The 'me' here is taking the accusative and therefore cannot be 'I'.

Re: years my younger

paco2004 — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:31:17 GMT

Hello GG

I feel the English expression "superior to me" comes from a Latin phrase "me superiorem (elder than me)" where "me" is the ablative case of the pronoun for the first person singular but incidentally the same in form as the accusative "me". On the other hand "my superior" might have its root in the translation of the Greek expression "mou presbyterion (elder than me)" where "mou" is genitive.

paco, another grammar geek

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

Re: at anytime/anytime

paco2004 — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:49:18 GMT

Hi

I understand "anytime" is a word proper to AmE. In OED, there is no entry for "anytime". OED contains 466 quotes using "any time" but only 9 quotes using "anytime". I believe the most formal expression in BrE is "Call me at any time". But "Call me any time" is also possible. In English, time adverbial noun phrases are often spoken without prepositions. This preposition-less adverbial noun phrase is called "adverbial accusative or objective" by some linguists, and it is a heritage of the old Anglo Saxon grammar. Because of its strangeness as a collocation in modern English, I believe, Webster changed the preposition-less adverbial "any time" to "anytime" and entered it as an adverb in his dictionary.

paco

Re: Much too much much

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 06:51:36 GMT

Hello Roro

Iâm now in my office and so I can't log in by my own ID

Why am I frustrated? I feel the use of bare NPs as temporal adverbials is a linguistic phenomenon common to many languages. But no English grammar book gives us this sort of information in a detail enough to make us use them freely.

We discussed this matter a bit before. If you are interested, please visit here.

Paco

[PS] I think accusative nouns are used as temporal adverbials in Russian too. Please visit "Time Expression in Russian"