Omzinesý wrote:
I'm not trying to get rid of subjects. I'm just speaking about word order.
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In my first post, I expressed my contrasting motivations. I'm trying to optimize between them.
Yes, and you asked which principle to give up, in the context of creating an easy world language, and I gave my opinion. One of your principles directly contradicts the goal of an easy world language, so that's the one you should give up if that's your goal.
I just find it "logical" that if you want to add an agentive causer to an unaccusative intransitive clause (i.e. transitivize it) you don't need to change the old construction, just to add the agent.
[...]
Before learning English, I found verbs like 'to boil' bery unintuitive. But in an auxlang, you should simultaneously avoid much morphology. So, using one verb in two constructions is handy, but the two constructions should be as similar as possible.
But now I'm confused, because what you're talking about here is derivational morphology, which has
nothing to do with questions of word order and so on.
What's going on with "to boil"? Well, it's confusing of course, because there's two different verbs "to boil":
The water boils (univalent verb)
I boil the water (bivalent verb)
Specifically, the latter is a causative verb formed from the former (or the former is a decausative formed from etc etc, but the former is both more straightforward and more in line AIUI with the evidence as a whole): "the water boils" > "I boil-0 the water" (i.e. I cause the water to boil). English is very free with created derived verbs with different valency, and in particular modern English usually uses zero-derivation to increase valency, including when creating causative verbs. [by contrast, older forms of English made a lot more use of overt valency-raising prefixes* or ablaut**, or simply periphrasis***; conversely, modern English typically prefers overt derivational particles when
reducing valency****, which is one reason I think it makes more sense to see the univalent verb as the basic form here].
In any case, we can see easily that this process is indeed derivational because a) it's only occasionally productive, and b) it produces unpredictable semantics.
So, for instance, "the water boils" > "I boil the water", but "the man snores" > **"I snore the man". "The cactus died" > **"the garderner died the cactus". Most verbs cannot form causatives through this zero-affix.
And, likewise, when valency-increasing zero-derivation is possible, the meaning is unpredictable:
"The water boils" > "I boil the water" [to maintain role, 'water' shifts from subject to patient. The new subject is a causer.]
"The fish smells" > "I smell the fish" [to maintain role, 'fish' shifts from subject to patient; but here the new subject is an observer, not a causer]
"The woman knits" > "The woman knits a scarf" [to maintain role, 'the woman' remains as a subject. The new patient is a product created by the verb]
Different languages can of course have different derivational morphemes, including zero morphemes. There's absolutely no reason why a given language would have to have a zero morpheme that derives causative bivalent verbs from univalent verbs by demoting the subject of the univalent to the object of the divalent and introducing the causer as the subject of the new divalent verb. I mean, there's no reason that has to happen at all! [that sort of demotional causative is not uncommon, and zero derivation of causatives is not uncommon, but plenty of languages have one and not the other, or neither, or have both but not at the same time].
[apparently, ALL human languages have at least some construction that promotes the causer above the causee, and in some sense demotes the causee; but this doesn't have to be by having causer and causee as subject and object of a single verb.]
However, what you were originally talking about was word order, and specifically word order rules that did not make use of the concepts of subject and object, but only of agent and patient. And that isn't particularly closely related to the question of derivational morphology - morphology and word order are different parts of the language.
[Note that eliminating demoting causatives would not by itself eliminate subjects and objects, as demoting causatives are only one of a large number of constructions in which subjects are not necessarily agents and agents are not necessarily subjects. "I'm not going to have any subjects or objects" is a massive deal, a huge, foundational, cross-cutting rule for a language that instantly makes that language very odd, comparatively speaking (it certainly happens, but it's certainly not common). By comparison, "I'm not going to have a causative construction that demotes the undergoer to object position" is a very small thing localised to a small area of grammar. Doing the former to accomplish the latter would be using a bulldozer to swat a fly.]
[that said, lacking demoting comparatives is actually pretty rare in its own right, so it automatically a weird thing to do in a world auxlang]
*such as be-, which often formed bivalents by adding a cause as a patient: "I mourn" > "I bemourn his death" [i.e. his death causes me to mourn]. Later, English adopted en-, which forms bivalents by adding a cause as a subject instead: "his hair tangled" > "I entangled his hair" [i.e. I caused his hair to tangle]. "The flame kindled" > "I enkindled the flame" [i.e. I caused the flame to kindle]. "The depressed man heartened at the news" > "The news enheartened him" [i.e. the news made him hearten]. Over time, however, the valency-modifying role of these prefixes has been obscured, often through the causatives being used to zero-derive new univalent equivalents that have replaced the originals, and instead the prefixes are more frequently used in denominal and deadjectival functions.
**"The tree falls" > "I fell the tree" [i.e. I cause the tree to fall]
***most often with 'do' or 'command' as the auxiliary verbs
****"The man kicks the dog" > "The man kicks out".