go_gentle | (no subject)

Dear flist: I haz a curiosity about languages, and I'm looking for data from folks who speak languages other than English. So, if you do, would you be willing to answer a couple of questions about whether two sentences are grammatical or not for me? (It's sort of a fussy point, so I suspect you probably need to be fairly fluent to have a grammaticality judgment.)

Sentence 1:

It seems to Mary that John is tired. (English)
Sembra a Maria che Gianni e stanco. (Italian)

Sentence 2:

John seems to Mary to be tired. (English)
Gianni sembra a Maria essere stanco. (Italian)

I don't need the translations into other languages - the Italian is provided because I had it to hand and it gives a sense of one way the translation might work. All I want to know is whether the translations exist would in a grammatical sort of way. (yes, I know sentence 2 is bad in Italian.)

[Poll #1377659]

I'll probably post a link back to this post on Monday for people who are away for the weekend, and if there's interest, I can write something up next week about what about the data I'm looking at and why it's interesting to me.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Count me in as an interested party in the write-up!

Since you already have some background, I can give you the two sentence version: someone suggested that English is the only language that can raise past an experiencer. I didn't believe it.

Yeah, I would agree with your skepticism, it seems incredibly hard to believe that there would be a phenomenon seemingly as straight-forward as that that would hold in only one of the world's languages. Have you tried a quick LLBA search for "raising over the experiencer" or similar to see what the literature says (if anything)?

I have published data for French, Spanish, Italian, and Icelandic so far. I've also got a host of citations to hunt down and actually read - a lot of it tends to be hardcore syntax stuff trying to explain away the difference, rather than survey and data stuff.

The second sentence doesn't work at all, but the first is technically grammatical in Swedish. Specifically, "Det tycks Mary att John är/verkar trött." Grammatical to an extent but outdated, nobody would say it like that.

Interesting! (I'm just trying to avoid the case that happens, according to the guy who told me about this, in French - where "they laugh at you when you ask them if it's grammatical.")

My Hebrew is nowhere near good enough to be a useful data point, but I'm fairly certain that #2 doesn't work. I think #1 is closer but the conjunction would be implied rather than explicit, i.e. "It seems to Mary John is tired" or "To Mary it seems John is tired."

What about "John seems tired to Mary?" It's not a pretty sentence with a proper name like that, and I probably wouldn't use it in writing, but speaking colloquially I would always say "He seems tired to me." Although now it occurs to me that #1 has a slightly different connotation than #2 and the one I suggested do. Hmm.

Interesting, thank you!

about the first one. Úgy tűnik Marinak, hogy János fáradt. is technically grammatical, but sounds kind of weird. if we keep this structure, I think I would rather say Úgy tűnik neki, hogy János fáradt. (It seems to her that John is tired.) and work Mary in elsewhere in context.

or you could say Marinak úgy tűnik, hogy János fáradt. (To Mary it seems that John is tired.). in which case Neki úgy tűnik, hogy János fáradt. (To her it seems that John is tired.) would also fall in the grammatical but weird category. (you would only say this if you wanted to oppose someone else who thought that John wasn't tired.)

so much for not providing the translations. but I think you should suffer a bit too. :D

Man, I don't know anything about Hungarian, but it's so cool looking. *__*

I entered my awesome German flatmate's answers, rather than my own monolingual ones. :)

Awesome! I was secretly hoping someone would know about German!