Re: The opposite of resumptive

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 01:50:47 +0200, Remi Villatel <maxilys@...> wrote:
>I'm stumbling on a grammatical term. Everybody knows what a resumptive
>pronoun is, it sums up something that has already been mentioned in a
>sentence or a conversation. Now, how do I call a pronoun or an
>expression that is used as a shorthand for something that still has to
>be expressed?
>The boy hit the ball. I saw it. ("it" is resumptive.)
>I saw this: The boy hit the ball. ("this" isn't resumptive.)
>Prosumptive? (Google finds it but it has nothing to do with grammar.)
>Presumptive? (Not exactly what I'm looking for.)
>There must be natlangs or conlangs which use such a sentence structure.
>This is the way Shaquelingua totally avoids subordinate clauses but I
>realized that my use of "resumptive" was wrong in such a case.
>If ANADEW, there must be a word, otherwise a neologism is all what's
>left. Err... Two neologisms since I also need a word for the class
>containing both the resumptive and the "anti-resumptive".
>Remi Villatel
>==================
"Anticipative" may be in actual use by some.

In the book "Word Order and Word Order Change", edited by Charles N. Li, is
an article "The Presentative Movement, or Why the Ideal Word Order is
V.S.O.P.", by Robert Hetzron.

Hetzron's data is that in several languages the part of the sentence which,
in the speaker's possibly vague opinion, the addresse most needs to
remember in order to understand the anticipated subsequent discourse, will
be "moved" to the end of the sentence.  Conversely, if that "presentative
movement" doesn't interfere, the part of the sentence which the speaker
believes is needed to "fill in the gaps" in the previous part of the
discourse will be moved to the beginning of the sentence.

(And Rosta says this doesn't happen, but he admits he knows for sure only
about English.)

Hetzron quotes Andrzejewski about sentences he calls "anticipative".  Many
of the "anticipative" sentences that Hetzron actually quotes follow this
pattern:

If the "anticipative" claus is "about" a NP other than its grammatical
subject, that NP gets moved to the front of the clause, and a "resumptive
pronoun" representing that NP gets left in its original place.  That
appears to be what makes the clause "anticipative".
(BTW Is this NP the "topic" -- because it gets moved to the front and
because the clause is "about" it?  Hetzron seems to think the presentative
element is the "focus" in most of his examples.)
In case the fronted NP is the one most needed in the anticipated subsequent
discourse, the "resumptive pronoun" which represents it undergoes
Hetzron's "presentative movement" to the end of the clause.

Hetzron gives five grammatical sentences in Amharic about a woman sweeping
a house with a broom and what happens to her or the house or the broom.
Each sentence is conditional.  The protases are all semantically the same,
and the woman is the grammatical subject of each.  There is one apodosis
about the woman, another about the house, and another about the broom.
Two of the protases are "anticipative"; one makes the house its topic, the
other makes the broom its topic.  It turns out that if the protasis is not
anticipative, each of the three apodoses can be grammatically appended to
it; but if the protasis is anticipative, the apodosis must have, for its
grammatical subject, the topic of the protasis.

How about that?  Could "anticipative" be one of the "opposites of
resumptive" you were looking for?

-----
eldin

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