The Agent Hierarchy and Voice in Some Coast Salish Languages

Jelinek, Eloise; Demers, Richard A.

doi:10.1086/465780

Cited by 103 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This predicts that in languages with a negative setting of (51) an active transitive inverse configuration should be completely excluded. As discussed by Jelinek and Demers (1983) and Nichols (2001), this is indeed the case in languages like Lummi or Picurís: inverse configurations cannot be active, but they require passivization in order to remove the 'offending' lower-ranked external argument.…”

Section: Hierarchical Agreementmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…e.g. Jelinek and Demers, 1983;Nichols, 2001; see also section 6.2.2). 7 The irreducible fact is that animacy-based systems involve some morphosyntactic phenomenon that is sensitive to the features of both the external and the internal arguments.…”

Section: The Animacy Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Klaiman (1992:235-237) conceives of it as a scale of ontological salience; Givón (1994) and Jelinek (2000) (a.o. ), as a scale of inherent topic worthiness; Jelinek and Demers (1983) and Dixon (1994) (a.o. ), as a scale of ''potentiality of agency'' (i.e.…”

Section: The Animacy Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

On the syntax of personal arguments

Bianchi

2006

Lingua

151

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Hierarchical Agreementmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: The Animacy Hierarchymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

On the syntax of personal arguments

Bianchi

2006

Lingua

151

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In these languages passive sentences cannot have a third person subject and a first person nonsubject argument. One example is the Salish language Lummi (Jelinek and Demers 1983): the Lummi equivalent of the man is known by me would be ungrammatical. Corpus studies of English have shown that these configurations, though attested, are statistically disfavored in English as well (Bresnan et al 2001;Aissen 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parallels between cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in Hebrew possessive constructions

Linzen

2014

Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Grammatical constraints in one language often surface as statistical tendencies in another, suggesting that cross-linguistic comparative studies can play a central role in the study of language-internal "free" variation. This paper applies this approach to the case of the variation between two Hebrew constructions: possessive dative (PD) and ordinary possession. While both constructions convey a possessive meaning, PD additionally highlights the fact that the possessor was affected by an event involving his or her possessed object. To elucidate the concept of affectedness, we turn to European languages that have encoded in their grammar various concrete reflexes of this notion, such as the animacy of the possessor (animate possessors are more often perceived as affected). We show that these concrete reflexes, while not grammatically encoded in Hebrew, have a statistical effect in that language as well. This makes it possible to predict the choice of construction in any given context using these objective proxies of affectedness. Furthermore, we argue that certain categorical restrictions on PD, previously attributed to formal syntactic factors, are best captured as consequences of the semantic affectedness condition. Our results illustrate the continuum between categorical constraints and statistical tendencies, both across languages and within a single language. 1 This paper uses the following abbreviations: acc: accusative marker; cs: construct state; PD: possessive dative; OP: ordinary possession. Transcription key: š = [ ʃ ], x = [x], c = [ts].

show abstract

“…In particular, the absence of syntactically transitive clauses -that is, clauses with two overt non-oblique actants -with third-person agents has been a central claim of a good deal of descriptive and theoretical work on this language (e.g. Hess 1973Hess , 1993aJelinek & Demers 1983). In Lushootseed, as in many Salishan languages, events that correspond to prototypically transitive events in languages like English are expressed by the combination of a radical stem with an applicative or a causative suffix (Hess 1993b).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics

Beck

2000

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Salishan language Lushootseed has been claimed to lack both syntactic subjects and morphosyntactically transitive clauses, a problematic stance from a universalist/ typological point of view. This paper offers evidence both for the syntactic role of subject in Lushootseed and the existence of transitive clauses, and examines the sentence-and discourse-level properties of Lushootseed subjects that make them essential for the grounding of events and discourse in both space and time. Their centrality to the discourse-organization of the language, and hence their recoverability, allows their frequent -and, in transitive clauses, obligatory -elision from the surface form of sentences.

show abstract

The Agent Hierarchy and Voice in Some Coast Salish Languages

Cited by 103 publications

References 8 publications

On the syntax of personal arguments

On the syntax of personal arguments

Parallels between cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in Hebrew possessive constructions

Semantic agents, syntactic subjects, and discourse topics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About