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

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.