Re: new parts of speech/cases

--- In conlang@y..., Kala Tunu <kalatunu@H...> wrote:

> my feeling is that his system is handy but completely
> misses the point with important kinds of predicates like "to fill a tank
> with water", "to plant a garden with flowers", etc, for which it is hardly
> easy to tell the focus from the patient.
The Obrenje case system on the other hand works beautifully here --
it's not hard to guess that the predicate should take the predicative
case.  ;-)



> By doing so, Rick Morneau tries to neutralize what french linguists call
> "the direction of the relation between an entity and its behaviour": at the
> sentence level, the entity is the base actor (let's call it improperly
> "subject") and the behaviour is the predicate (let's call it wrongly
> "verb"). There are "attributive" relations between the subject and the verb
> called "endocentric" because the verb "focuses inwards on the subject's
> state" and "active" relations called "exocentric" because they focuses on an
> object's state. "The cat eats the mouse" is endocentric because the
> direction is really from the mouse to the cat, or said in other words, the
> state focused at is the cat's state, not the mouse's state. "The cat eats at
> the mouse" is exocentric because it focuses on the mouse's painful change of
> state.
My lack of linguistic education may be fooling me here, but I appears
to me as if this distinction were being addressed in the syntax
section of the Obrenje grammar (end of chapter 4.1).

     http://catharsis.netpeople.ch/langmaking/obrenje_syntax.htm

The object of the verb |tog-| "to eat" could be cast into either the
predicative case or the objective case, depending on whether the
verb action is seen as endocentric or exocentric:

Togoq       salime   i    cikkue.
/tO"gON     sa"li:m  i    sik"ku:/
Eat:LIQ:3e  cat:d    OBJ  mouse:d
"The cat is eating the mouse."
(Exocentric: The eating is directed at a particular mouse.)

Korow    togoq       salime   u    cikku.
/kO"row  tO"gON      sa"li:m  M    "sikkM/
Again    eat:LIQ:3e  cat:d    PRE  mouse:i
"The cat is eating mice again."
(Endocentric: The cat is performing its habit of mouse-eating.)

Does that make sense or did I get the definitions of endo-/exocentric wrong?



> ok, so basically you promote the patient "I" into an agent directing the
> action of reading towards a new patient "man" while the book keeps being a
> focus. in other words, you make an endocentric verb "to read a book" into an
> exocentric verb "to read aloud to someone". i do exactly the same in my
> conlang by suffixing "to" to the verb in order to focus to another actor
> than the focus: "i read-to the man the book".
This is exactly the one example I use to illustrate how an object
can take different cases with the same verb depending on its role
in the verb action.  =)

http://catharsis.netpeople.ch/langmaking/cases2.gif



> "i called him an idiot" where "him" is the patient of "to call" as well as
> of "to be an idiot", but since "idiot" may itself be analysed as the focus
> of "to call", you could say that "him" is the patient of "to call" in
> relation to the focus "idiot".
Je          renoze      u    quq.
/jE         r@"no:Z     M    NMN/
PER:3s:OBJ  name:PST:1  PRE  idiot:i
"I call him an idiot."



-- Christian Thalmann