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

Yep, this is the way I took the language when I learned some (although
when to use ligatures gave me problems). It's supported by the fact
that: a) obliques are marked in the same way as possessives b) "verbs"
when used as arguments are treated exactly like nouns in the markers (ng
or ang mainly) that they take, and finally c) "adjectives" in fact seem
to be treated like nouns in most respect, with order of noun and
adjective (if there even is truly such a distinct class) in the NP and
their general behavoir seeming extremely similar if not identical. It'd
be funny if this analysis is correct, since creating all noun languages
is a regular "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. So in this analysis you need two classes
of roots: one for action / state words from which you can derive various
nominalizations, and one for noun roots which do not take the same
nominalizing markers.

>
> Cf. Paz Naylor's example:
>    Maganda     ang babae
> STATIVE-beauty NOM woman
>
> In her analysis, Tagalog is reckoned not to have syntactic verbs, but
> quasi-verb nouns. 'maganda' is, in this analysis, a noun denoting the
> stative concept of being beautiful. To quote her:
> "Schachter and Otanes (1972), Naylor (1980), Ferrell and Stanley (1980)
> and others have pointed out that Tagalog and/or Philippine-type sentence
> structure is like an equation, it is thus _bipartite_ and one nucleus
> constituent _equates_ with the other and the two are joined by
> parataxis."

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