Outline for report #4: Case/adpositional systems (due Wednesday, 19 Feb).

	In this report you are to address the following question: What are 
the means employed by your language to indicate (or "encode") the 
relationship to (or roles played in) the performance of the action by the 
referents of the NPs selected by a given predicate? For example, English 
uses four different means to indicate the roles of Agent, Patient, and 
Recipient with the three-place (ditransitive) verb give in sentences like: 

	(a) We gave her him (in marriage). 
				[Not everyone finds (a) grammatical.]
	(b) We gave him to her.
	(c) She was given him (by us).
	(d) He was given to her (by us).

1. linear position: In active voice Agents precede, Patients follow the 
verb: (a) (b).
2. case: In active voice Agents get the nominative; others (if pronouns), 
the objective: (a)(b).
3. adpositions: With a ditransitive verb the NP preceded by to is 
the Recipient: (b) (d).
4. voice marking: If {be -en} is present the NP preceding the verb is not 
an Agent: (c) (d). (Voice marking is especially elaborate in some 
Austronesian languages: see Schachter)
5. head-marking ("polydiathesis"): Combines voice-marking with concord in 
person, number, and/or noun class (common in Bantu and PNG languages like 
Yimas). In a head-marking system neither position nor case of an NP is 
used to distinguish Agents from Patients. Instead, an NPUs grammatical 
function (GF) is indicated by cross-referencing agreement affixes on the 
verb. GF together with voice-marking is used to identify the participant 
role:

	(e) tyim      sooz-ah-akh	   tsi      gari
	    they.NOM  send-2sgSUBJ-3plOBJ  you.NOM  home	
	     'You'll send them home.'		(Kashmiri)

6. lexical idiosyncrasy: the meaning of the predicate is such that its
subject or direct object or other NP is interpreted to bear a particular
role to the action, even though in the language other means are usual for
the expression of that particular role. Examples from English: the
predicate use whose direct object plays the role of Instrument in
some other action or the predicate emit whose subject is a Source
which (with other predicates) would get an adposition like from or
out of. With some predicates the thematic role of a given NP is
ambiguous: the direct object of pick up in English can be either a
Patient (f) or a Locus (g):

(f)	Pick up your clothes!		(g) Pick up your room!

	Similarly, with straighten up:

(h) 	Straighten up this desk! (when said to a child vs. to a carpenter)

NB: Probably no language relies on just one of these six means. In (i), 
for instance, the Source is indicated by the adposition from, the linear 
position of me, and (redundantly) by the use, with a pronoun, of 
the 
objective case:

(i)	This came from me. 

	Furthermore, some purely local or directional roles that an NP can 
play in an action are almost always indicated by adpositions: 'behind', 
'in front of', 'around', 'from above', etc. There are dozens of locative 
distinctions and subdistinctions that a language must have the means to 
express; far too many to be distinguished by the non-lexical means given 
under 1, 2, 4, or 5. Finnish comes perhaps the closest to an TexhaustiveU 
case system:

(j)	Paradigm of Finnish talo- 'house' (partial):

	talo	nominative (subject)	talolle	allative ('to')
	talon	accusative (object)	talona	essive ('as')
	talon	genitive ('of')		taloa	partitive ('[part] of')
	talossa	inessive ('in')		taloksi	translative ('[changes] into')
	talosta	elative ('out of')	talotta	abessive ('without')
	taloon	illative ('into')	taloin	instructive ('with', 'by')
	talolla	adessive ('on')		taloine	comitative ('together with')

	Again, some predicates express relationships that cannot be easily 
accommodated in the usual repertories of participant roles. How, for instance, should 
the participants role of the direct objects be formulated in the following?

(k)	Wiles has finally proved [Fermatt's last theorem].

(k')	The moon's disk subtends [an angle of about one half degree].

Which roles are played in the performance of an action by the referents of 
the italicized NPUs in (l) through (ae)? What are the means employed to 
encode them? 

Roles: Agent, Patient (Theme), Force, Experiencer, Recipient, Source, 
Goal, Locus, Instrument, Beneficiary...

(l)  Mary sent John home.	       (m) John was sent home by Mary.
(n)  Mary sent them home.	       (o) They were sent home by Mary.
(p) The wind blew down the fence.      (q) The fence blew down with the wind.
(r) That seemed odd to me.	       (s) That struck me as odd.
(t)  Mary gave a rose to John.	       (u) Mary gave John a rose.
(v)  We are walking to Pretoria.       (w) We got these boards from the mill.
(x)  He is resting in his wing-chair.  (y) Say it with flowers.
(z)  Win one for the Gipper.	       (aa) Peel me a grape.
(ab) Monday precedes Tuesday.	       (ac)Tuesday follows Monday.
(ad) Strip the bark from the tree.     (ae)  Strip the tree of bark.
(af) Hit the ball up for him.	       (ag) Hit him up for the money.

Report #4: Present an overview (with appropriate examples) of the 
grammatical ways and means by which the nine or ten roles in (l) through 
(aa) are indicated in your language. (Discussion or examples of Force may 
not be available...) In addition, if your language has case, present a 
paradigm like that under (j).

Remember: Make a provisional selection of the topic for your coursepaper 
and submit an outline of it by Wednesday, 5 March.

The Midterm (hour) Exam is on Monday, 10 March.