Re: Trigger language question concerning the use of "to be"

On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at 12:55 , Tim May wrote:

> Chris Bates wrote at 2005-05-09 23:56:41 (+0100)
[snip]
>> "wacky no natlang does it" conlang idea. The one problem I can see
>> is that, while you can argue all occuring verb forms are
>> nominalizations, there are certainly verb roots which are not in
>> the same class as noun roots, since I don't believe nouns can
>> freely take the same morphology as verbs.
>
> Not so.  Roots differ in terms of which voice/focus/nominalization
> affixes they can take, but they don't split cleanly into verbs and
> nouns.  Nearly all roots can take at least some, and very few can take
> all.
That's very interesting. If nearly all, however, any idea why not all can
take at least one?

> e.g.
> _bahay_ "house" _magbahay_ "to build one's house"
> _anak_  "child" _maganak_ "to breed" _ianak_ "to give birth to someone"
> _walis_ "broom" _magwalis_ "to sweep"
>
> (_mag-_ "actor voice", _i-_ "conveyance voice")
>
> The paper to read on this is Nikolaus Himmelmann's "Lexical categories
> and voice in Tagalog".
>
> http://www.linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/~himmelmann/LEXCAT.pdf
I shall.

> He doesn't actually call Tagalog words "nouns", on the grounds that if
> you only have one category it doesn't make sense to identify it as
> nominal or verbal.
That makes sense. In fact Bloomfield did that by calling them all "full
words"

> He does note that you might choose to call
> voice-marked words "verbs" on the understanding that it's a purely
> morpho-lexical and not a syntactic category.
Yes, it is syntactic category that we are concerned with, I think.

> Section 3.1 is particularly relevant to the matter under discussion.
>
> Some of his points:
>
> * Almost all Tagalog roots are glossed as English nouns, adjectives or
>   participles rather than finite verbs.
>
> * There are four basic morphosyntactic functions in Tagalog clauses:
>   predicate, subject, non-subject argument or adjunct, and modifier.
Good - that is what I have understood  :)

>   Tagalog content words are not subcategorised with regard to terminal
>   syntactic categories.  All phrasal categories with the exception of
>   the predicate (when clause-initial) are composed of a function word
>   which indicates the category and a content word.  Content words are
>   not subcategorised with regard to the content words with which they
>   may appear, and all content words may serve as predicate.  Fully
>   inflected ACTION-words (that is, words denoting actions,
>   prototypically verbal concepts) can serve in nominal constructions
>   (subject, adjunct, modifier, with quantifiers) without any special
>   treatment.
>
> * Tagalog roots definitely do, nonetheless, fall into lexical
>   categories with regard to the affix-sets with which they may occur,
>   and the meaning of the resulting affixed forms.
>
> * Practically all Tagalog roots (and many derived stems) can occur
>   with at least one "voice" affix (and concomitant aspect/mood
>   inflection) without any further derivation.  Conversely, roots are
>   not bound - almost all roots may occur in unaffixed form, though
>   some do so more naturally than others.
>
> * Voice marking is essentially derivational in character.
Excellent stuff, by the sound of it (meaning that it seems to concur with
the understanding I have been getting from the - admittedly very little -
Tagalog I have come across   :)

I shall be reading Nikolaus Himmelmann's paper!

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

Reply