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Re: Ambiguity

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 6, 2009, 13:34
Hi!

A little late: happy new year to y'all.  I delved into some other
programming projects so I wasn't active here in the last few days.

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> On 2009-01-05 Roger Mills wrote: >> An additional problem that gets a lot of >> attention is that Prevli has inalienable >> possession, so that in a sentence like "Mary >> says that she will feed the baby", _baby_ MUST >> carry a possessive suffix, usually -z, so "titi- >> z" 'baby' can mean 'his/her baby' or (in >> context) 'the baby'. One would assume that we >> mean "Mary will feed (her own) baby", but what >> if Mary is an aunt, a sitter, or just a helpful >> friend, etc. ? (The pronoun "she" is also ambiguous-- >> Mary? someone else?) How necessary would it be >> to be absolutely precise in cases like this? Or >> should we just leave it to our old friend >> "context"? >... > > I have a strong feeling that natlangs with this > kind of ambiguity would leave it to context.
I agree. It is not *necessary* to disambiguate. So the decision is simply a question of design goal/personal taste for your conlang, I think. Greenlandic has a fourth person for this. The second clause would use a 'reflexive' 4th person subject ending on the verb. 'reflexive' it is called -- it is a long-distant reflexive, because the reference is in a different clause (so the 4th person is even possible as the subject of the clause). **Henrik

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deini nxtxr <deinx.nxtxr@...>