Planeación y desarrollo de las zonas metropolitanas

By the means of the Brentano-Marty theory in logic, Kuroda (1972) makes a distinction between two kinds of propositions, one containing a notional subject and a notional predicate (categorical judgments), while the other containing only a notional predicate (thetic judgments). To be more specific, the formation of categorical judgments is composed of two acts: one is the recognition of the referent which is made the notional subject, and the other is the affirmation/denial what the predicate expresses about the notional subject. In contrast, thetic judgments have only the act of affirming/denying the relation expressed by the notional predicate. These are

instantiated below:

(172) The dog/Fido is running. (Kuroda 1972:163)

(173) (a) X is the dog/Fido (Kuroda 1972:163) (b) Running of X

(174) A dog is running. (Kuroda 1972:162)

(175) (a) X is a dog (Kuroda 1972:162) (b) Running of X

Sentence (172) contains the proposition with both a notional subject and a notional predicate; therefore, the formation of its proposition is to identify the notional subject from the previous discourse first, as in the a-part of (173), and then to identify the notional predicate, as in the b-part of (173). However, the formation of the proposition of sentence (174) is only concerned with the identification of the notional predicate

running (i.e. the b-part of (175)) since the grammatical subject a dog cannot be identified from the previous discourse as presented in the a-part of (175).

Kuroda’s (1972) distinction is purely based on semantics, but it gives an implication that a language which structurally realizes thetic judgments exactly like categorical judgments is a subject-prominent language because this language favors grammatical subject so much that it is structurally realized even though the notional subject does not exist (É . Kiss 1995). For instance, English is a typical example of subject-prominent language:

(176) (a) It is raining. (Impersonal) (É . Kiss 1995:7) (b) There is a dog in the room. (Existential)

(c) A dog came into the room. (Presentative) (d) All dogs like bones. (Universal)

Impersonal, existential, presentative and universal sentences are structural substantiation of thetic judgments, which are supposed to have no notional subject. However, they do have grammatical subjects in English. As for those languages in which the structural substantiation of thetic judgments is different from that of categorical judgments, they are topic-prominent languages. É Kiss (1995) stated that “in topic-prominent languages the (primary) syntactic predication structure is always directly mapped on a notional predication relation, whereas in subject-prominent languages this is not the case (p.13).” Based on Kuroda’s (1972) dichotomy, it is intriguing to know whether our target language is a topic-prominent language or a subject-prominent language. The answer comes from the following thetic judgments in Squliq Atayal:

(177) mosa qwalax Ø. (Egerod 1980:540) Aux.Fut AV.rain Ø

‘It will rain.’

(178) nyux m-hlaqiy Ø. (Egerod 1999:72) Aux.Prog AV-snow Ø

‘It is snowing.’

(179) m-aki’ qutux kinholan raral mga… AV-exist one elder.person before Par ‘There was an old woman in the past…’ <N>

(180) nanu’ a, raral ga, m-aki’ qu’ hato. Par Par before Top AV-exist Nom wild.pigeon ‘Well, once upon a time, there was a wild pigeon.’ <N>

(181) m-wah kya qutux qu’ zipun.84 (FLA) AV-come there one Nom Japanese ‘A Japanese man came there.’

(182) raral qasa ma s-m-’ang kwara’ utux. (Rau1992)85 past that Par AV-get.angry all ghost

‘In the past all the ghosts were angry.’

The examples in (177) and (178) are impersonal sentences with weather verbs, in which there is no subject following the predicate mosa’ qwalax ‘will rain’ or nyux mhlaquy ‘be snowing’ respectively. This is different from the subject-prominent language English, which must have a dummy subject it in impersonal sentences. Impersonal sentences manifest the topic-prominence of Squliq Atayal. Nevertheless, there are grammatical subjects in existential, presentative and universal sentences, like qutux kinholan ‘one elder person’ (179), hato ‘wild pigeon’ in (180), zipun ‘Japanese’ in (181) and kwara’ utux ‘all gods’ in (182). The last three kinds of sentences are like canonical sentences with sentence-final subject. These are typical characteristics of subject-prominent languages. Among the above four tests of thetic judgments, one shows that Squliq Atayal is a topic-prominent language whereas the other three show that Squliq Atayal is a subject-prominent language. Why does this discrepancy occur?

One possible explanation is that there is an invisible dummy subject in impersonal sentences of Squliq Atayal, if one insists that the thetic-judgment tests make a clear demarcation of subject-prominent languages from topic-prominent languages, as claimed by É Kiss (1995). Although this explanation maintains the consistency and

84 _{The intervention of the nominative case qu’ between qutux ‘one’ and zipun ‘Japanese’ can be analyzed} in two ways. The first possible analysis is that this example is a case of quantifier-floating, a common phenomenon in languages. The second one is that qutux ‘one’ is the predicate of zipun ‘Japanese’ and qutux qu’ zipun is an internally-headed relative clause, the existence of which is attested in (Liu 2004a, b, 2005).

85

The gloss of utux in Rau (1992) is ‘god’, not ‘ghost’. The original translation of this sentence is ‘In the past all the ghosts were angry.’ The Atayal people believe that after death, a person’s ghost will continue to protect his/her descendants, like a god. The translation in Rau (1992) is not wrong, but to be consistent, the word utux is glossed as ‘ghost’ in the present thesis.

validity of thetic judgments, it is an ad hoc stipulation since this invisible dummy subject exists nowhere except in impersonal sentences. What is more, the inconsistency of thetic judgments still appears in topic-prominent languages, as illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentences:

(183) Ø zhengzai xia yu. Ø Prog fall rain ‘It is raining.’

(184) Ø you yi-zhi gou zai na-ge fangjian. Ø have one-Cl dog in that-Cl room ‘There is a dog in that room.’

(185) Ø you yi-zhi gou zoujin na-ge fangjian. Ø have one-Cl dog come.in that-Cl room ‘A dog came into that room.’

(186) gou dou xihuan gutou. dog all like bone ‘All dogs like bones.’

It is a well-known fact, since Li and Thompson (1976), that Mandarin Chinese is a typical topic-prominent language. The sentences from (183) to (185) show that there is no grammatical subject in impersonal, existential and presentative sentences.86 However, in universal sentences like (186), there is a grammatical subject gou ‘dog’. These sentences prove that thetic judgments do not work well even on typical topic-prominent languages. The discrepancy has been pointed out by Xu (2005[2002]). In order to account for this, it is possible to propose another language-particular

86 _{More details on these three sentence types can be referred to Chao (1968), Chu (2010), Li &} Thompson (1981), Liu et al. (1996[1983]), and Tang (1979[1977]), inter alia. Unlike traditional analyses, Tsai (2003) analyzes you “have ” as an unselective binder, not a modal/verb, in existential and presentative sentences. If his research is on the right track, it is highly possible to analyze yizhi gou “one dog” as a grammatical subject. Then, thetic-judgment tests will look more useless in determining whether a language is topic-prominent or not.

stipulation, just like what is proposed for Squliq Atayal in the beginning of this paragraph. Honestly speaking, this kind of language-particular stipulation merely wipes the question under the carpet rather than solves it. So does the complete abandonment of thetic judgments, as Xu and Liu (2007) did because of their adherence to the typological classification proposed by Li and Thompson (1976), since most of subject-prominent European languages are diagnosed as topic prominent languages under thetic judgments.

Alternatively, contrary to É Kiss’s (1995) idea that subject-prominent languages and topic-prominent languages are typologically exclusive, the present thesis agrees to the idea that there is a continuum between radical subject-prominent languages and radical topic-prominent languages, which results from the interactions between i-structure and other syntactic modules. These thetic-judgment tests should not be treated as homogeneous criteria. The inconsistent outcome of thetic-judgement tests is due to recessive factors from the respective mini discourse contexts of these four sentences, which should be delved into one by one rather than lumped together. In other words, only by recognizing their internal divergences can linguists really tell what the syntactic interactions with information structure are in each language and make more subtle typological comparisons. Being eager to adopt or to reject É Kiss’s classification will deprive us of the opportunity to observe how linguistic systems operate internally.

Of these four thetic-judgment sentences, impersonal sentences do not indicate any referent but only an event especially in languages where there are a group of weather verbs, like Squliq Atayal and English. The former adopts different strategy from the latter. In Squliq Atayal, non-existential information is not syntactically-substantiated. This strategy complies with both the iconicity principle that morphosyntactic structures have to be as close to the conceptual structures as possible and the economy principle that morphosyntactic structures should make the least effort to fulfill the most

communicative functions (Haiman 1983, 1985).87 Under the LFG framework, the c-structure of this kind of languages is more sensitive to i-structure than f-structure, the details of which will be discussed in the next section. Thus, as illustrated in (177) and (178), there is no argument in an impersonal sentence except the weather verb itself. The other strategy is adopted in English and many other European languages. Owing to syntactic requirements, the subject position has to be filled with a dummy subject. Although this violates iconicity and economy, it achieves the regularity of morphosyntactic realization—that is, every sentence in this kind of languages always has a subject-predicate configuration. Put it in LFG terminology, c-structure in languages of this kind is more sensitive to f-structure than i-structure. As for languages like Mandarin Chinese, in which there are no weather verbs, impersonal sentences do have referents, i.e. the entities (like snow and rain) occurring in weather phenomena. Their positions follow the language-particular constraints on the interactions between syntax and information structure.

Existential and presentative sentences are closely related in terms of their mini discourse contexts. These two sentences serve to introduce a new participant into the information flow (Dryer 2007, Quirk et al. 1972, 1985, Ward, Birner & Huddleston 2002). Erteschik-Shir (2007) claims that they have implicit scene-setting topics, which are exactly the tempo-spatial scene where the event exists. As shown in (179), (180) and (181), the new participant is placed in the subject position in both existential and presentative sentences of Squliq Atayal, a fact running afoul of what we found in the tests of question-answer pairs. In addition, the new participant introduced through these two sentence types must be important in the global discourse context or the local

87 _{Most of the time, the iconicity principle competes with the economy principle since complex concepts} need complex syntactic structures to express while simple structures economize the effort to complete communication (Haiman 1983, 1985). The competition between them is manifested in the ranking competition between faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints in the OT (Cf. Kager 1999, Prince & Smolensky 1993). The harmony between iconicity and economy is not impossible, as shown in coordination reduction (Haiman 1983).

discourse context where it exists (Givón 1993). Otherwise, addressers do not bother to introduce a new participant. This also proves that the subject position in this language is closely related with important information, i.e. the information with [+ABT]. The same mapping between grammatical subject and important information no matter that information is given or new is also reported in other predicate-initial languages, such as Ojibwa (an American language) in Tomlin and Rhodes (1992). Remind that the mini discourse context of existential and presentative sentences is different from that of question-answer pairs. On the one hand, it is reasonable to state that these two sentence types have their own mapping pattern between syntax and information structure. For instance, they both require grammatical subjects conveying new information, counter to the general requirement of given information. On the other hand, these two sentence types display the commonality of grammatical subject in this language. That is, grammatical subjects in Squliq Atayal convey important information, which has been pinpointed in Chapter 4. Details and LFG mechanism will be discussed in the next section.

As for universal sentences, their communicative function varies with discourse contexts. Although É . Kiss (1995) claims there is no act of identifying referents in universal sentences, the universally quantified subject may serve either given or new information, depending upon what context the whole sentence occurs. This is illustrated below:

(187) Q: What did you learn from today’s lesson? A: All dogs like bones.

(188) Q: What do you know about dogs? A: All dogs like bones.

information, which is the whole sentence itself, while the second one has all dogs as given information, which merely repeats what the first speaker says, and the rest of it conveys new information. Put it simply, universal sentences are not relevant to any specific mapping between syntax and information structure. This sentence pattern is not helpful to elucidate the interactions between them.

In conclusion, this section demonstrates that the application of the thetic-judgment tests to differentiate subject-prominent languages and topic-prominent languages always brings about discrepancies. The inconsistency of their outcome manifests that there is a continuum between radical topic-prominent languages and radical subject-prominent languages and that the clear-cut typological dichotomy between these two types, as proposed in É . Kiss (1995), does not hold. These thetic sentences however provide linguists the opportunities to observe how syntax interacts with information structure since they represent different special mini discourse contexts. In addition, Squliq Atayal has characteristics of both subject-prominence and topic-prominence, seeming to stand between the two ends.