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

Re: Toff's error

Huevos — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:22:13 GMT

It's using a nominative pronoun where an accusative is required. A few decades ago it started to become fashionable to have children attend school without actually teaching them anything. The teachers corrected them, "Sarah and I", not "Sarah and me" without actually teaching them when or why "Sarah and me" was wrong. I lot of students assumed "Sarah and me" was always wrong and so always avoided it in an attempt to speak "better".

Re: If I were ...

Avangi — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:43:34 GMT

Hi Tanit, Huevos recently made an impassioned plea for the accusative on a thread, "Nominative and Objective Pronouns - - - - - - Confusing!" Did you miss it? - A.

Edit. Ah, I see you're referring only to the third person. Sorry. To my ear, there's no difference between first and third. I'm one of those relics who is still more comfortable using the nominative case in nominative situations.

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: About the meaning of "where"

Velimir — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 08:56:07 GMT

Hello again,

Unfortunately,I've put one part in my previous post wrongly.Sorry for that.It would be correct to use the preposition "toward" in the following part:

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

What I've stated after that would be true now,i.e the following noun will be in the dative case.But,if the stress is on the final destination of flying,traveling,going..then the following noun will be in the accusative case,necessarily preceded with the preposition "to".(the preposition "to" perfectly match serbian "za",as attendant to the verbs of motion).
Although the case of a noun is influenced by the verb,modifying adjective(and its case),number(and its case)and gender of that noun,the case of the noun is most heavily influenced by the preceding preposition,if it is present.If the noun is not preceded with a preposition then other factors will determine the case of the noun.The importance of the preposition is apparent in the following example:

I arrived in London. - the noun "London" is in the accusative case

I arrived from London. - the noun "London" is in the genitive case

I suppose that it would require serious contemplation to explain all aspects of the "case" in any language,and additional comparison with english would make it really painful.

Best regards

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: I/me

Tanit — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:41:46 GMT

Amy,

I hope I can take advantage of this post to ask you to go into more detail.

Long ago, I was told in this forum that sentences like "You're taller than me" & "You're taller than I" (omitting "am") shouldn't be used.
Shame on me ... I use the first one a lot when speaking (because of my mother tongue, I guess) and started to use the second one when I was in the UK, because of a teacher who used it quite often (now I don't use it any more -- if I happen to do that, I tend to pause and add the verb! ).

The poster pointed out that these structures can be ambiguous and gave me an example similar to:

I love her more than you.

If "her" = Mary and "you" = Ann, this sentence can mean either (1) I love Mary more than Ann does or (2) I love Mary more than (I love) Ann (I guess it usually means no. 2).

Since you wrote that "You're taller than I," although stiff, is grammatically correct, I'd like to ask you whether there are any constraints on this structure.
I mean, can we use it only when the verb is intransitive? or does the problem of ambiguity lie only in the pronoun ("you" is both nominative and accusative, while there is not a similar problem with I/me, he/him etc.)

Many thanks!

Re: unergative verbs and unacussative verbs

CalifJim — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:35:20 GMT

Generally speaking, the subject of a sentence, where the subject is the agent of the action of the sentence, is the "external argument". Other noun phrase arguments of the sentences (particularly the direct object, also called the accusative) are referred to as the "internal arguments".

According to thier definition, unergative verbs are monadic verbs which have 1 external argument, whereas unaccusative verbs are monadic verbs which have 1 internal argument.
the examples given are:
wilt, fall, collapse, burst, vanish, rust, fail, expire - unaccusative V
run, caugh, laugh, fly, sing, yawn, swim - unergative V

So it seems that, according to the definitions you gave, the unaccusatives are missing a subject and the unergatives are missing an accusative -- in some sense -- so that the underlying structure of the concepts of wilt, fall, run, laugh, etc., are something like:

... wilts me, ... falls me, ... collapses me, ... vanishes me, ...
I run, I laugh, I yawn, ...

Thus, I imagine the central claim is that wilting, falling, collapsing, etc. are things that happen to me; I do not actually do them.
Conversely, running, laughing, yawning, etc. are things that I do (as an agent); they do not just happen to me.

But I'm merely speculating. None of it has never made a lot of sense to me, and over the years I've found what seem to me to be contradictory definitions of these verb classes, so let me know if you find out what it all means. I'd be interested in finding out.

CJ

Re: please help me identify two sentences

Cool Breeze — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 13:21:04 GMT

The answer to your question depends on how the answerer defines passive. As I is not the object of any action in the sentences, many think that the sentences are active and the verbs prepared and finished are adjectival. However, structurally the sentences are in the passive voice as both contain a form of the passive auxiliary (be) and a past participle (prepared, finished).

I don't think it matters a whole lot which view you take. Speakers of other languages often have difficulties with structures like yours when they are faced with the fact that one pair of words can have two totally different meanings:

The door is closed at 9 o'clock.
- refers to the act of closing, which takes place at 9

The door is closed all night.
- refers to the state the door is in, closed, not open, and the door is in this state all night

Should the closing of the door be so difficult that it takes all night, the same structure (= is closed) would have to be used. As there are no inflections for nouns in the accusative and there is only one passive structure in English, this theoretically represents a problem. In another Germanic language, Swedish, there are three totally different types of passive voice, which means that problems like this never arise.

CB

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.

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

Re: Toff's error

Re: If I were ...

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

Re: the middle voice option

Re: About the meaning of "where"

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

Re: I/me

Re: unergative verbs and unacussative verbs

Re: please help me identify two sentences

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

Re: About the meaning of "where"