QUESTION-New project

JimG -- Say, for those like me who came in late, could you illustrate your
statements with nonce-examples with English lexemes?   I want to know more
about proximate vs. obviative, applicatives, direct/inverse marking, the
promotion of NP's to direct object status, etc.?    This help will make and
other listers very grateful.   :-)

Jim



>I'm already thinking about a major change in the new project that I've
>posted about a few times in the last few weeks.  To recap very briefly,
this
>conlang (still unnamed) uses proximate/obviative marking on third-person
>noun phrases and direct/inverse marking on verbs to distinguish the agents
>and patients of transitive verbs (as in the Algonquian languages), and also
>to mark topic and focus.  (The topic is proximate; the focus is obviative
>and occupies the immediate pre-verbal position which would otherwise be
>occupied by the topic.)  An extensive system of applicatives allows NPs
>other than subjects and direct objects to be topicalized by promoting other
>NPs to direct-object status.
>This works fine for intransitive and monotransitive verbs, but I'm finding
>that it get really complicated and messy when dealing with ditransitive
>verbs.  I've figured out ways to make it work, but they strike me as rather
>ugly and not really in keeping with my original vision of this grammar.
>(Among other things, they require a fixed word order for certain clause
>types, something that I wanted to avoid.)  Therefore I'm thinking about
>introducing a rule that there are NO ditransitive verbs: that on the
>syntactic level every verb has at most two arguments (a subject and a
direct
>object), and that with verbs that semantically require three arguments
>(e.g., "give"), one of them must always be expressed as an oblique object
>(the object of a preposition).  All such verbs would have applicative forms
>that allow the patient/theme and recipient/goal NPs to freely exchange
>syntactic roles.
>To illustrate using analogous constructions in English (which conveniently
>happens to allow all of the relevant construction types): under my old
>system, one would way "I gave the woman the book" (recipient = primary
>object, patient = secondary object).  Under my new system, this
>double-object construction is not allowed; instead one has a choice of
>saying either "I gave the book to the woman" (patient = direct object,
>recipient = oblique) or "I presented the woman with the book" (recipient =
>direct object, patient = oblique) (except that the verb forms corresponding
>to "gave" and "presented" would be different forms of the same lexical verb
>rather than separate lexemes).
>Applicatives would be just as necessary as before, but they would work
>somewhat differently.  I had envisioned them as being much like Bantu
>applicatives, which, when they promote an oblique object to direct object,
>leave the original direct object (if any) unaffected, resulting in a clause
>with two direct objects (or rather, a primary and a secondary object).
>Under the new system, an applicative would demote any pre-existing direct
>object to an oblique object (with the choice of preposition being lexically
>determined by the verb).  I don't know if there are any natlangs that have
>applicatives that work this way.