Re: Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:25:33 -0400, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:

>On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:04:29 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
wrote:
[...]
>>Talk of too strict disambiguity in language, at
>>least naturalistic (qua natural human language-
>>like) language as opposed to computer language or
>>the most ivory-towered loglang, makes me leery.
>>Ambiguity, fuzziness and under-specification are
>>as much a feature of natural language as is
>>redundancy! The reason of course is that any
>>ambiguity at some level (lexical, morphological or
>>syntactic) will be resolved by context at another
>>level, or as the last resort by the recipient's
>>knowledge of the world. Moreover the canonical
>>communicative situation is not reading a book but
>>a conversation (be it face-to-face or by email)
>>and in a conversation the interlocutors can always
>>ask/clarify if they don't or seem not to get the
>>intended meaning.
>
>*sigh* Looks like I worded that a bit imprudently; let's take another stab.
>
>I was cautioning against thinking that things like, you know, "the adjective
>corresponding to the noun 'tooth'" is a good enough way to specify the
>meaning of one of your lexemes.  Certainly there are plenty of langs, nat or
>otherwise (indeed many of my conlangs are among them), that have an
>all-purpose derivational operator "noun -> adjective".  I'm all for
>naturalistic ambiguity in derivations; usage, or secondarily context, can
>really sort out a great lot.  Even so, supposing you're making such a
>language, I'd say it's not enough to note down in your lexicon something like
>  *_matan_, tooth.  adj _matanko_
>unless you define the adjectiviser _-ko_ in general elsewhere, or unless you
>really mean to leave the operation a general adjectivisation in all cases
>(and this seems either idealistic or lazy -- usage won't let it survive that
>way for long).
Bleh, even that didn't really hit home.  I mean to contrast

(1) the situation where you have a derivational operation whose general
definition is "noun -> adjective", but on these nouns it means 'richly
supplied with N', on these ones it means 'belonging to an N', on these ones
it means 'possessing the abstract property that is N', ..., on these ones it
has the first two of those senses, on these some other subset, ...

(2) the situation where you have a derivational operation "noun ->
adjective", and that's all you say about the point ever.

(2) is the lazy option, and indeed in its neglect to consider what senses
might have been lexicalised for particular words I find it just as unnatural
as having no derivational ambiguities at all.

Alex