Use me, abuse me: Indicating the instrument

[muckefuck]

If you find yourself confused by some of the grammatical terminology in this entry, you may want to jump back and read the previous entry, which defines some of the concepts referred to here.

An instrumental role

One theta role which seems to be frequently marked is that of instrument (an inanimate participant that performs an action at the behest of the agent). A prototypical example would be knife in the following example:

I cut the bread with a knife.

Clearly, bread is the patient in this example: It undergoes a change of state due to the action of cutting. But what about the knife? It's what actually transforms the patient from uncut bread to cut bread, but it's inanimate, so it can't be an agent. Since it is I who has the intentionality in this example, I fulfils the agent role and knife is considered an instrument.

Now, obviously, not every language indicates the instrument by using a prepositional phrase, like English does. What are some of the other possibilities?

Derivative approaches

One solution is deriving a new verb that expresses "to cut with a knife" without the need to indicate an explicit instrument. English, which make liberal uses of verbing, often allows this. For instance:

He called me by phone. -> He phoned me.

But, in this case, the verb knife exists with a slightly different meaning, i.e.

I knifed him. <-> I stabbed him with a knife.

Applicatives represent a specific sort of "verbing" derivation, one that generally turns one sort of verb into another. Basically, an oblique argument (such as the object of a prepositional phrase) is "promoted" to the position of direct object. German forms applicatives productively with the prefix be-, e.g.:

Ich wohne in einer Eigentumswohnung. "I live in a condo." > Ich bewohne eine Eigentumswohnung. "I inhabit a condo."

Just as it was possible in this example to take the object in and make it the direct object of a verb, it is possible in some languages to lift "knife" from "with a knife" and do the same. For instance, Hausa:

an sṑke shì dà wuƙā "Somebody stabbed him with [a] knife." -> an sōkà masà wuƙā (lit.) "Somebody stabbed to.him [a] knife."

Compare the English sentence "I slice a knife into the bread". But, once again, the similar English phrase ?"I cut a knife into the bread" is jarringly unidiomatic.

Another possibility is deriving a compound verb, knife-cut (Cf. hand-cut, e.g. I hand-cut the fries <-> I cut the fries by hand.) But, again, the freedom of English isn't quite enough for this usage to sound idiomatic. That might not be the case in other languages. (For a slightly different type of compound, see the Chickasaw example, below.)

Getting analytical

The idiomatic choice in English (and in other Standard Average European languages, like Spanish, German, and even Welsh) is to use free morphemes to construct a prepositional phrase, i.e. with a knife, con un cuchillo, mit einem Messer, etc.

Chinese favours a similar solution, although--strictly speaking--it doesn't use prepositions but "co-verbs".

我用刀把麵包切 wǒ yòng dāo bǎ miànbāo qiè "I cut the bread with a knife."

用 yòng, corresponding here to "with", can also be a full verb meaning "use" (e.g. 教我怎样用刀叉 jiāo wǒ zěnyang yòng dāochā "Teach me how to use a knife and fork"). Thus, the sentence could also be translated as "I, using a knife, seize [another co-verb] bread, cut". This represents what is often called a serial verb construction.

Theoretically, it would be possible to use word order alone to express the instrumental role. All you would need would be a predicate which takes at least three arguments--one for the agent, one for the patient, and one for the instrument. (Not necessarily in that order.) English does have verbs like this, e.g. give with slots for agent, theme, and patient, but nothing I can think of which allows one of the arguments to be an instrument. I'm sure the constructed language Lojban would allow such a predicate, but I couldn't tell you what it would be.

Inflection on the noun

Agglutinative" endings can be difficult to distinguish from independent words. I imagine much of the reason why the Korean instrumental affix (으)로 /(u)lo/ is considered the former is that is has allomorphs based on the form of the stem. (The (으) /u/ appears after some consonant stems in order to break up awkward clusters.)

나는 빵을 나이프로 베었어요 /na nun ppang ul naiphulo pay.ess.e.yo/ "I cut the bread with a knife"

Turkish ile is right on the border between postposition and suffix. It can appear as a separate word (e.g. bıçak ile "with a knife") or it can attach to the noun and follow vowel harmony, just like any other inflectional suffixes (e.g. bıçakla; cf. bıçakta "on a knife").

Fusional endings, however, are less ambiguously inflectional because the same ending simultaneously expresses multiple categories such as number and gender in addition to case. For instance, Czech nožem "with a knife". For other nouns, this ending could appear as -ou, -í, or -ím in the singular and -y, -i, -ami, -ími, etc. in the plural. (By contrast, Turkish would simply stick on the plural suffix -lar before the ending, i.e. bıçaklarla "with (a/the) knives".)

Inflection on the verb

Osage, on the other hand, takes quite a different tack: It adds an instrumental inflection to the verb rather than the object. This is the locative prefix i-. Compare:

wacue hpaase "I cut the bread"
wacue mąhį ihpaase "I cut the bread with a knife."

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Osage is highly synthetic in its verb complex, but not elsewhere. There's no marking on either wacue "bread" or mąhį "knife" to indicate which is patient and which is instrument. Generally, direct objects precede other complements in Osage, but the semantics would allow one to reorder the sentence if the speaker wanted to emphasise mąhį. The semantics (a knife can cut bread, but bread can't cut a knife!) would make the meaning clear in any case.

In general, Chickasaw uses a similar expedient in the form of the instrumental prefix isht, e.g.

tali' is(h)sabo'watok "S/he hit me with a rock". (Cf. bo'li "to beat, to pound".)

However, in the specific case under scrutiny, it uses a participial construction. That is, the verb bashtabli "to cut with a knife" is composed of the participle of bashli "to cut, to saw" and the root verb tabli "to cut, to pull apart". Thus, the statement paskaã bashtablilitok "I cut the bread with a knife" could be more literally translated as "Sawing, I cut the bread".

Getting complex

The second Chickasaw example is right on the border of another possibility, that of using a subordinate clause of some sort. This is the sort of construction required by the polysynthetic Wakashan language Kyuquot Nootka (a relative of Kwakiutl).

č̓ičƛa·qƛ 'uḥw̓ał x̣uta·y "He will cut it using a knife."

The English above is, obviously, only a rough equivalent. The literal meaning of 'uḥw̓ał is "it-use".

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

hmmmmm... but what if a strangely hard bread actually did break your knife (maybe use of 'break' rather than 'cut' would make the critical difference - if such a distinction exists)?

Traumatised by Arabic, I used to be all about separate modifying words for ease of use, over pre/suf/infixes - until I started learning Dutch, which made me realise, reflexively, how arbitrary and unpredictable prepositional phrases are in English. Why do you travel by train and with a bag, and not vice versa? Under the weather? Over the worst? Beside the point? Up the junction/spout? (bij de bakker, met de trein, op Diensdag om elf uur)
Who's supposed to remember and interpret this nonsense?

[itchwoot.livejournal.com]

Oh, phrases like "under the weather" are at least quite easy to remember because that's a very specific combination. I'm having more problems with idioms like "being up to sth.", "being up to so.", "being onto so.", "being into sth.", "taking after so.", "taking to so.", "taking against so.", "taking on so." and so on.

I was already traumatized by one single lesson of Arabic, btw. Never did a second one. I couldn't hear the difference between all the "a"-type sounds.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

These are all much, much better examples than the ones I could think of last night. Yes, that's exactly what I mean. For instance, your second example suggests to me only an unusual/specialised use: "do you think you're up to (meeting) John tonight?" [can you tolerate/withstand/accept the challenge of meeting John?]

When I think about it at all, I try to write papers in such a way that they would be easy to translate, or easy for non-native speakers to understand (I know I often fail in this)... but I've often been tempted to write a paper as far as possible only using idiomatic expressions, so it winds up with a Seussian economy of vocabulary but you can't get it if you're not up on how we English talk.

[itchwoot.livejournal.com]

Regarding "being up to so.":

It's up to him.

;-)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Oh. Right, yes. Didn't even cross my mind.
This is difficult.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

One of the few rigourous attempts I've seen to explain the patterns undergirding such usages is the essay on over in George Lakoff's introduction to cognitive linguistics Women, fire, and dangerous things. He tries to show how the core meanings of the preposition/adverb are extended to ever more metaphorical usages in ways that are unpredictable, but still motivated. That is, once the connexion is explained to you, it "makes sense" on a certain intuitive level which is what allows you to remember the various usages, but knowing the core meaning is not enough for you to predict the extended usages, since there are conflicting metaphors at work and several core lexemes vying for extension. As a result it's not surprising that even closely related varieties often end up making different choices, resulting in confusingly incompatible usages. (And since many standard varieties are essentially cobbled together from a selection of spoken forms, it's also not surprising that such inconsistent usages frequently end up side-by-side.)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

This accords strongly with my naive assumptions (that it made sense to someone, to begin with: it all makes sense to me, now, but then I grew up with it) and therefore sneaks right under my critical filter - great title on the book, though; I'll give it a look. Also, an awful lot of these are spatial metaphors, which makes them easy for me to deal with on some level. I imagine there are people who aren't hobbled tightly to spatial thinking, I think they're also the theorists I find it hardest to follow.

At the risk of being trite, Dutch is quite stunningly beholden to maritime metaphors, too (possibly even more than English).

Hang on: rigourous - are you secretly English, or are you mirroring me?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm no more English than your royal family, but neither am I imitating you.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I don't know Osage at all well, but my suspicion is that they'd express this lexically using a root like xǫ "break" or leke "shatter" instead of se "cut". (Paase is actually a derived stem meaning "to cut by pressing down".) Or it's possible that they could use a so-called "positional article" to background the noun "bread" (e.g. wacue kše "bread lying there") making it clear that the knife is the direct object. Then again, there are a variety of paraphrastic solutions for such a rare occurrence, e.g. "I tried to cut the bread with the knife and the knife broke".