Re: Lurker surfaces and requests critique.

Quoting Muke Tever <alrivera@...>:

> From: "Steven Williams" <feurieaux@...>
> > Firstly, I have a really unique way to indicate
> > relationships.
>
> Be quite careful in making claims of uniqueness :-)
Indeed.  There are, afterall, about 6000 distinct languages
out there, not including dialects.  The amount of diversity
therein is fairly immense.

> > ('kat' and 'mavs' are not the real words, by the way
> > :). Haven't started attacking the vocabulary yet.)
> >
> > The subject and the verb are treated as one
> > inseperable item whose components may not be moved
> > about - the verb itself is marked and the subject is
> > left alone.
>
> This appears to be a form of incorporation... subject-incorporation,
> really.. where the subject and object are treated as a single
> word.  (Object incorporation is more common, i.e. "Kat mavs-jenkui".)
Correct.  In fact, subject incorporation is quite rare, but it
does exist IIRC in Chichewa and some East Indian languages.

> I don't know whether English forms in -'s can be considered incorporated.
That's certainly not the traditional analysis.  IIRC, <'s> has been
analyzed before as being a determiner that cliticizes to its
specifier phrase, but is itself the specifier to the following NP.
Someone who specializes in syntax, like Matt P., may be able to tell
us better about this.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier          "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers