How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

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How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 10, 2019 8:53 pm

There was some discussion on another thread recently about the value of terminology, and I was going to say something there about some overlooked terminology that I think really clarifies the logic about noun declensions quite effectively, but I was about to start talking about the words and not the meaning, and that would have been a mistake, given how I was going on about how meaning has to precede terminology... so a thread on terminology wasn't the right place to start it.

Anyway, so declension's a bugger. It's not just a matter of remembering which ending to put on which word, but also which declension to use with which verb and/or preposition -- it all just seems so arbitrary. Even where the terminology is explained, it still seems arbitrary. Accusative means "done to"*, fine, but dative means "given to", and there's not a lot of giving in some of the situations where it's used (Scottish Gaelic teachers have generally ditched the term dative and replaced it with "prepositional", but that still isn't perfect as a couple of prepositions govern nouns in the genitive...).

However, when I was studying basic linguistics, they introduced us to the idea of thinking about how a noun is presented as having a degree of "agency" by the grammar and vocabulary around it, and how that same word can be presented as being "affected" by other things in the same way.

For example, in "I shot the sheriff", "I" clearly has a lot of control over the situation, hence "agency" -- the action occurs by my choice. "The sheriff doesn't have any real choice in what happened, and therefore is not presented as having "agency" -- he is, however, very deeply affected by the action -- far more so that "I" am.

If we extend the description to "I shot the sheriff with the gun", the gun is not given any agency, and it's not particularly affected (intuitively we understand that the state of the gun isn't completely unchanged by being fired, but the sentence isn't talking about changes to the gun at all).

I have only ever learned one language with declensions to any real degree of fluency (Scottish Gaelic), so I'm not the world's best decliner, but when I look at German verbs (I'll learn the language properly one day, I promise!) I automatically try to make sense of the choice of case in terms of agency and affectedness.

For example, the genitive verbs listed here all imply a small degree of "agency" on the object -- a person who is suspected, accused or convicted is assumed to be to blame for that (yes, I know we say "innocent until proven guilty", but we also say "there's no smoke without fire"); and while some dative verbs can be readily understood by the notion of giving (eg antworten - to answer; cf. give an answer) others can't, and are best understood by thinking about how little the object is affected by the action of the verb (eg. gefallen -- if something pleases me, I am only lightly affected by it; it lifts my mood, but it doesn't change my fundamental physical state in the same way that being shot by Bob Marley would).

Now, this doesn't immediately make everything obvious. Why is "wehtun" dative? Surely nothing affects the other person more than being hurt? The way I reason around this is that "wehtun" isn't the real action, but a side effect of some other action -- i.e. it's an indirect effect. I'm not sure that this really justifies it, but it's as close as you can get.

Nothing in language is ever going to be perfect though, and at least looking at it as a rule and exceptions means that you're only having to memorise the exceptions individually, and the main pattern takes care of itself.
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Mar 10, 2019 10:54 pm

It is hurtful to me. To whom is it hurtful?

To whom - dative.
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Daniel N. » Mon Mar 11, 2019 8:57 pm

The problem is, in some IE languages (German, Slavic, likely more) I helped the sheriff uses dative.

I would rather suggest thinking in terms of "patterns". For example, if someone feels something, that is one pattern (which also uses dative in German and Slavic languages for the person who feels).

Names are not important, the same case is called prepositional in Russian, but locative in Czech and Polish.
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Cainntear » Tue Mar 12, 2019 9:48 am

Daniel N. wrote:The problem is, in some IE languages (German, Slavic, likely more) I helped the sheriff uses dative.

I don’t see that as a problem. Helping doesn’t directly affect the sheriff in the way shooting does, so it’s implying lower affectedness.

Part of the thing here is accepting that affectedness and agency can be subjective and thinking through how one language conceptualises it differently from another.
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Mar 12, 2019 2:08 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Daniel N. wrote:The problem is, in some IE languages (German, Slavic, likely more) I helped the sheriff uses dative.

I don’t see that as a problem. Helping doesn’t directly affect the sheriff in the way shooting does, so it’s implying lower affectedness.

Part of the thing here is accepting that affectedness and agency can be subjective and thinking through how one language conceptualises it differently from another.

Honestly the more you get into the nitty-gritty, it just gets arbitrary. You can use this kind of thinking to justify which verbs take the dative if you already know them, but you can't necessarily use it to predict whether an unknown word will be accusative or dative.

Ich glaube dir - I believe you (dative)
ich glaube an dich - I believe in you (accusative)

Why is believing someone dative? In hindsight you can say that you're not believing a person directly but rather what they say; therefore there's an implied direct object of the thing that you believe, making the person who said it the indirect object. But you couldn't necessarily predict it without just knowing that glauben is a dative verb.

But to believe in someone is accusative. Why? Well it just is. „An“ can take either case depending on the situation, but in a phrasal verb it just takes the accusative.

Ich rasiere mich - I'm shaving [myself] (accusative)
Ich rasiere mir die Beine - I'm shaving [myself] (dative) the legs (accusative) (I'm shaving my legs).

This is clear enough. When you're shaving a body part, that becomes the direct object, so you become the indirect object. However:

Ich kaufe einen Rock für dich - I'm buying a skirt (accusative) for you (accusative).

Why? Because even though “you” should clearly be the indirect object, „für“ is an accusative preposition.

Ich gehe in den Park - I walk into the park (accusative).
Ich gehe in dem Park - I walk around in the park (dative).
Ich gehe zum Park - I walk to the park (dative).
Ich gehe durch den Park - I walk through the park (accusative).
Ich gehe um den Park - I walk around the park (accusative).

The first two examples use the same preposition, but it's accusative if you're changing location and dative if you're moving around within a set location. For the other examples, the case is just arbitrarily determined by the preposition.

Also, the distinction between agent and patient doesn't always coincide with case.

The grammatical agent is often confused with the subject, but these two notions are quite distinct: the former is based explicitly on its relationship to the action or event expressed by the verb, whereas the latter is based on the flow of information, word order, and importance to the sentence. In a sentence such as "The boy kicked the ball", "the boy" is the agent and the subject. However, when the sentence is rendered in the passive voice, "The ball was kicked by the boy", "the ball" is the grammatical subject, but "the boy" is still the agent. Many sentences in English and other Indo-European languages have the agent as subject.

The use of some transitive verbs denoting strictly reciprocal events may involve a conflation of agent and subject. In the sentence "John met Sylvia", for example, though both "John" and "Sylvia" would equally meet Dowty's definition of a Proto-Agent, the co-agent "Sylvia" is downgraded to patient because it is the direct object of the sentence.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_(grammar)

The grammatical patient is often confused with the direct object. However, there is a significant difference. The patient is a semantic property, defined in terms of the meaning of a phrase; but the direct object is a syntactic property, defined in terms of the phrase's role in the structure of a sentence. For example, in the sentence "The dog bites the man", the man is both the patient and the direct object. By contrast, in the sentence "The man is bitten by the dog", which has the same meaning but different grammatical structure, the man is still the patient, but now stands as the phrase's subject; and the dog is only the agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_(grammar)

In German:
Der Hund beißt den Mann - the dog (nominative) bites the man (accusative).
Der Mann wirt vom Hund gebissen - the man (nominative) is bitten by the dog (dative).
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Chung » Tue Mar 12, 2019 4:16 pm

I was just about to express something similar but Deinonysus got there first.

Reframing the declension of the complement in a nominative-accusative language as a matter of "agency" can sometimes help someone justify the choice of case ending but it's still not that helpful because it can get masked or overriden by syncretism (particularly the merging of conventionally accusative and genitive endings), telicity (which can be linked to aspect) or definiteness (a singular indefinite direct object is left unmarked - in other words, it's visually identical to the nominative). If anything, "agency" seems more explicit or topical when considering voice. I think instead that transitivity (or even valency) is more relevant when talking about marking for direct and indirect objects.

In any case, I was thinking about degree of agency/involvement when expressing obligation, and the ways to do it in English, Finnish and Azeri.

We English speakers arguably have the widest choice in that we can use modal verbs in active voice in addition to less active (or outright passive) constructions. The choice of verb expresses the degree or intensity of the obligation.

"I must..." versus "I need to/have to..." versus "I'm obliged to/compelled to/forced to..." versus "I ought to/should..." versus "it's necessary for me to..."

In Finnish, you're confined to impersonal constructions with the choice of verb signalling the degree or intensity of the obligation. Even if you'd want to signal degree of agency as you could in English, Finnish offers no such choice, thus leaving it to you to come up with some other way to convey that nuance of agency/involvement (if it's relevant). The subject under obligation is put in genitive rather than nominative, and this setup in Finnish of a subject in some case other than the nominative (i.e. genitive or partitive) comes with the territory of an impersonal verb and suggests a certain lack of control. In English, we'd usually begin this kind of sentence with a dummy "it".

Minun täytyy / on pakko... versus Minun pitää... where the first set is closest to "I must / have to..." and the second phrase is closest to "I should...".

What you're saying is literally translateable as "Mine must / is obligation..." (Minun täytyy / on pakko...) and "Mine holds..." (Minun pitää...)

It's a similar story in Azeri in that you use impersonal constructions of "to be" with an adverb with the choice of adverb signalling the degree of intensity of the obligation. You can't turn to an active construction to signal how the obligation is more in your control than you're letting on. The subject with the obligation is put in dative or genitive rather than nominative, depending on the verb.

Mənim ... vecibdir (subject in genitive) versus Mənə ... lazımdır/gərəkdir (subject in dative) where the first variant is stronger than the second set. What you're saying is literally translateable as "Mine ... is requisite/urgent" (Mənim ... vecibdir) and "To me ... is necessary" (Mənə ... lazımdır/gərəkdir)

I'm thankful though that it doesn't seem likely here that we're about to go in circles as happened in this thread because of a particularly stubborn poster. :roll:

For related discussion see the following:
- The original purpose of "dative" verbs (plenty of other examples brought up, and not just by me)
- Words to the wise from Holland
- Nominative and accusative the same
- Accusative marker
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Mar 14, 2019 12:58 am

Deinonysus wrote:However:

Ich kaufe einen Rock für dich - I'm buying a skirt (accusative) for you (accusative).

Why? Because even though “you” should clearly be the indirect object, „für“ is an accusative preposition.

Ich gehe in den Park - I walk into the park (accusative).
Ich gehe in dem Park - I walk around in the park (dative).
Ich gehe zum Park - I walk to the park (dative).
Ich gehe durch den Park - I walk through the park (accusative).
Ich gehe um den Park - I walk around the park (accusative).

It's worth pointing out that almost all these examples translate literally to most Slavic languages (except those that lost cases). The only sentence where Croatian would use some other case is the last one.

However, Slavic languages, in phrases "in the park" use a specific case, locative or prepositional, which has more or less merged with the dative in Croatian and Serbian, making it even more similar to German (but these cases didn't merge in most Slavic languages).

It gets even more complicated when you take various ways of expressing time into account. For example, in BCMS, instrumental is used to specify... an instrument, tool used to do something. So it's straightforward. But it's also used to express that something repeats on some day of week, or periods lasting an indeterminate number of units (like, "for years"). Now, there is a way to explain this, but it's still far from obvious and has to be learned.

Even worse, not all locations are a preposition + locative. That would be too simple. Some locations are expressed with a preposition + genitive case, some with a preposition + instrumental case, and even with a preposition + accusative case!
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Daniel N. » Thu Mar 14, 2019 1:06 am

Cainntear wrote:I don’t see that as a problem. Helping doesn’t directly affect the sheriff in the way shooting does, so it’s implying lower affectedness.

However, seeing someone or understanding someone affect the person even less (he or she might be unaware someone saw them), but the verbs "see" and "understand" typically use the same case as "kill" or "destroy", i.e. the accusative case.
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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love declension

Postby Cainntear » Tue Mar 19, 2019 9:20 pm

I keep meaning to come back to this when I'm at a keyboard, but keep forgetting.
Deinonysus wrote:Honestly the more you get into the nitty-gritty, it just gets arbitrary. You can use this kind of thinking to justify which verbs take the dative if you already know them, but you can't necessarily use it to predict whether an unknown word will be accusative or dative.

I wasn't really talking about predicting as much as not forgetting. Maybe it's something peculiar about my brain, or maybe I'm even just imagining it, but I find that thinking about these types of categorisations helps me put things into boxes after first exposure and get them right in future rather than reverting to a sort of "translationese" from English.

I also find that there's a certain internal logic to every language, and even when I can't quite see what it is, it starts to coalesce and I find it easier to associate things together as I get closer and closer to the analogies underlying the language.

But if I let myself think of them as arbitrary, I don't make the connections, I don't make the categories, and the words all exist separately. One doesn't help the other and it seems like more effort and more confusion.

The grammatical patient is often confused with the direct object. However, there is a significant difference. The patient is a semantic property, defined in terms of the meaning of a phrase; but the direct object is a syntactic property, defined in terms of the phrase's role in the structure of a sentence. For example, in the sentence "The dog bites the man", the man is both the patient and the direct object. By contrast, in the sentence "The man is bitten by the dog", which has the same meaning but different grammatical structure, the man is still the patient, but now stands as the phrase's subject; and the dog is only the agent.
True.
But many linguists feel that the passive still implies some sense of agency -- newspapers often use this to shift the blame to the victim.

Consider this example:
"A woman was attacked by a jaguar as she was apparently trying to get a photo outside the big cat’s enclosure at Wildlife World Zoo in Arizona" [Washington Post]

...and be honest. Don't we all kind of assume she was to blame when we hear she was trying to take a selfie...?
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