Incorporation
From: | Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, October 1, 2003, 11:02 |
The recent discussion of polysynthetic languages mentioned that such
languages frequently incorporate the object into the verb. This brought a
couple of ideas to mind about other possible incorporation schemes to mind.
The first is one that had been floating around in my mind for a while, and
is a topic incorporation sceme, for use in a topic comment language. The
basic structure of a verb complex is
<adverb>-aspect-<adjective>-topic-verb-role
where <> indicates an optional component, and the role is a suffix
indicating the relationship of the topic (or possibly focus) to the verb.
Possibly there might be null morphemes in the aspect or role positions. The
rest of the sentence would consist of further arguments to the verb
complex, or "action" as I decided to call it.
The second is an infixing scheme, where the verb is incorporated into the
subject, and the object is incorporated into the verb. Each word has a
proclitic, which for nouns or pronouns would indicate such categories as
person and number, for verbs tense and aspect, and for qualifiers degree of
comparison. "The cat sat on the mat which was flat" might then come out as
3ps-pt-3ps-pt-pos-flat-be-mat-sit-cat
Finally, while Khangaþyagon doesn't have any sort of noun incorporation, it
does incorporate adjectival predicates into verbs, for example
analekdahelt ye yemdoshtbelut ye'uz
joy.adj.be.2p.imp 2p bear.pp.day.at 2p.gen
Happy birthday.
Any thoughts?