Re: Agreement Idea

Eugene:
<<
But in that case, wouldn't the agreement simply drop off the verb
after a while, because it wouldn't serve any purpose unfulfilled by
virtue of syntax? Because verb-fronting generally emphasises the verb,
i.e. the action of giving, itself, whereas if the NP were fronted as
well it would blunt or lose the emphasis; if the purpose were to front
the NP then the verb wouldn't need to be fronted either.
 >>

First of all, the very notion of agreement is unnecessary, but
we're still stuck with it.  Things don't disappear simply because
they're unnecessary--even if they don't serve any purpose at
all (cf. English "-s" in "He eats quickly").

Of course, if this was troubling, you should note that I rather
uncreatively decided on prefixes to express noun class.  It doesn't
need to be that way.  What if, instead, lexemes were represented
with consonants, and noun classes were represented with vowels?

Class I: CeCCi
Class II: aCCeC
Class III: CoCCu
Class IV: CaCiC

And suppose the way verbs agreed with nouns in class was by
taking the vowels of the nearest noun class.  Then the verb
wouldn't have any way of being vocalized without agreement.

But that aside, fronting doesn't need to just be about emphasis.
In fact, with my original example, there's, presumably, no reason
why you couldn't front nouns and verbs in the ordinary way--the
nouns because just as easily as you can decide which noun precedes
the verb, so can you easily decide which noun comes first.  And
then suppose you could simply move the verb by itself to the
front for emphasis--why not?  (Presumably it'd still agree with
the last NP, if this were purely a pragmatic process.)

The fact that you have an NP and a V "conjoined", in a way, by
agreement allows you to do *other* things.  For example, let's
say it worked this way:

(1) kaven meluri ritapu tunese tuxoro.
/I-man II-woman-DAT III-flower-ACC IV-tongs-INS IV-give-PAST/
"The man gave the woman a flower with tongs."

(2) tunese tuxoro kaven meluri ritapu.
/IV-tongs-INS IV-give-PASTI-man II-woman-DAT III-flower-ACC /
"A man gave a woman a flower with the tongs."

(3) meluri mexoro kaven tunese ritapu.
/II-woman-DAT II-give-PASTI-man IV-tongs-INS III-flower-ACC /
"A man gave the woman a flower with tongs."

(4) kaven kaxoro meluri ritapu tunese.
/I-man I-give-PAST II-woman-DAT III-flower-ACC IV-tongs-INS/
"The man gave a flower to a woman with tongs."

In other words, in sentence (1), the definiteness of pretty much
everything is up in the air--you either figure it out from context,
or you're stuck with ambiguity.  The constructions in (2-4),
however, force the first item to be definite, and the rest to be
indefinite.  This isn't emphasis; it's simply letting the hearer know
something about their own knowledge of the status of the
nouns mentioned in this sentence in the greater discourse--specifically,
which ones are definite and which aren't.

That's just one of the many, many possibilities I was imagining.

Oh, and thanks to Eric for fixing my glosses!  It's so hard to
remember words in a made-up made-up language sketch!

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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