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new parts of speech/cases

From:Garrett Jones <alkaline@...>
Date:Tuesday, April 30, 2002, 20:47
After being halfway through the quarter in my linguistic typology/language
universals class, i have come to learn/think that parts of speech and cases
are not at all universal across languages. Trying to name the things in
Minyeva using the nomenclature of european languages is thus futile. So, i
decided to come up with a couple extra names for what happens in my
language; I was wondering if i could get some comments on the names and/or
suggestions for better names:

1. patient-object (in english: sometimes direct object, sometimes indirect
object). In active order, the entity that is the intended recipient of
creation, destruction, change, or control. For giving, it is the entity that
receives the object; for speech verbs, it is the person talked to. For
simple actions like kicking, it is the person kicked. A patient-object is
not involved in mental acts like loving or perceptual acts like seeing, that
is for the focus-object.

2. focus-object (in english: sometimes direct object, sometimes
prepositional phrase). In active order, the entity that is the focus of a
perceptual or mental act, a thing that is transferred (theme), or an
elaboration of the verbal concept. The inherent properties of the
focus-object are not changed by the action.

3. causijunction (in english: random idionsyncratic constructions). I have
referred to causijunctions earlier as "causation particles". They are the
particles that relate to events together in a causation string. The various
examples of causijunctions can mean stuff like "resulting in", "attempting
to", "for the benefit of", "having no relation with the fact that", etc.

I'm not completely sure about having semantic words inside the names of the
cases, because even though the semantics and the cases are intimately
related, they aren't one and the same. Here are some alternate names that
might work:

patient-object: patientive, objective (such as Christian's Obrenje).
focus-object: focusive, predicative (such as Christian's Obrenje).
causijunction: interjunction.

the problem with using objective and predicative is that they don't align
exactly with Obrenje cases.

--
Garrett Jones
http://www.alkaline.org