🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan24.115746.29666@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

[stuff on Breton omitted]

> Well, again we can add several languages to the list. Swedish and
> German are two. In German you only get an ambiguity when none of
> the words are masculine with articles, so the example above does
> not translate well to German, since "Hund" is masculine, but take
> a cat instead:
> 
>        "Eine Katze sah Tom"
> 
> I leave to Leo Connolly to sort out the fine details for German, but
> in Swedish:
> 
>        "En katt s}g Tom"      ("}" = a-ring)
> 
> You don't really know what this is without context. Normally you put the
> subject first, but then again you are more often talking of what Tom sees
> than what the cat sees.

I wouldn't be surprised if the fine details for German and Swedish were 
the same, though I don't know for sure.  German OVS is limited to sentences
where the object is *topicalized*, i.e. set as the item about which a
comment is made.  Overwhelmingly this means that the topic is given,
already mentioned in the discourse.  This is difficult with the indefinite
_eine_Katze_, though definite _die_Katze_ would be no problem.  Nevertheless,
if 'a cat' is given, it is probably also known that a cat was seen.  So
"Eine Katze sah Tom" would the mean 'The one who saw a cat was Tom', or
less awkwardly: 'It was Tom who saw a cat.'

Strangely, an SVO reading for that example is quite unlikely, in my opinion.
Indefinite subjects can precede the verb, though they are not likely to
do so; but there's a logical problem: SVO would, to me, entail that the
cat then took some action because it had seen Tom: "A cat saw Tom and
reported this to the proper authorities."  However, I wouldn't
find this entailment with a verb such as _beobachten_ 'observe', though
I don't know why not.  The normal way to say 'A cat saw Tom' is:

	Dann hat eine Katze Tom gesehen.

This can only be read as XVSO, not XVOS: word order disambiguates in
this instance (which is not to say that XVOS is not legal with a few
verbs such as _gefallen_ 'be pleasing', provided that O is definite).

--Leo Connolly