Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Super and Sub-catenatives

From:Andrew Patterson <endipatterson@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 3, 2004, 16:37
Here's a few ideas on how to expand the idea of the catenatives for conlang.

I haven't really got the ideas clear in my head yet.

1. Instead of having one class of verbs called the modals, have suffixes to
indicate whether it is epistemic, deontic or dynamic, or a mixture of that.

2. Have prefixes to indicate whether that modality is strong, medium or
weak.

Perhaps this system of prefixes and suffixes could be extended to cover the
other catenatives.

The gerunds could indicate lack of action, but there could be a class of
sub-gerunds to indicate actual apathy and passivity.

The infinitives could indicated purpose with a class of super-infinitives
to indicate single-minded determination.

In English very few gerunds take objects. Why not? We could make them have
objects. I'll have to think about how to do that though because in English
only "prevent someone from" and "keep someone from" has an object. Maybe
because there is some deontic meaning to the object - you are trying to
change things through an agent.

Andrew Patterson.
http://www.geocities.com/endipatterson/
http://www.geocities.com/endipatterson/catenative.GIF