Re: LW again -- Noun and verb

Quoting Mau Rauszer <maurauser@...>:

> Zesefde Thomas R. Wier  <trwier@...> ta 2002.08.27. her 13:31:57
> -5h:
>
> > Quoting Mau Rauszer <maurauser@...>:
>
> > Do all nouns have male and female forms? If so, why? One would
> > think that this is more a property of adjectives agreeing in
> > gender with a noun.
>
> Technically they can. Male forms are usually used for living things (in the
> usual meaning) but cats see world as a *living* one and so the elements can
> be either male or female. They think all duat, darkness is the child or
> manifestation of Duat, the concept/"god" of darkness created by Ingonyama
> from the soul of Wiyanyama in the beginning.
Okay, I hadn't realized that this language is spoken by a race
of cat-like creatures;  I gather that these cats are not much
like Kzin.  But it does not follow from a claim that the world
is living that the world is also gendered, unless you further
stipulate that fact.

> > > Tenses : historical past - past perfect - past - present - future -
> future
> > > perfect.
> >
> > Is the future perfect considered a tense for mophological
> > reasons?
> Probably...
I ask, because "future perfect" is usually a label given to
a morphological or syntactic construction that has both future
tense and perfect aspect, and as such is not a pure tense.

> > > Aspects: Habitual - Continous
> >
> > These aspects usually pattern together in languages.  A more
> > common split is perfective / imperfective.
> Yeah but there they are different.
How?

> > > Voice: Passive: -lu. Used when the action happens to the subject.
> >
> > Is there an antipassive? How about an instrumental-focuser?
>
> Antipassive? It's probably just the unsigned "normal" form.
That is not what the term <antipassive> is usually taken to
mean (though of course you can label your feature that, if you
so desire).  An antipassive is a valence-changing operation on
a transitive verb that, like the passive, makes it an intransitive
verb.  Unlike the passive, which demotes the agent and promotes
the patient to subject, the antipassive does the reverse, demoting
the patient to an optional peripheral phrase and keeping the agent
as the subject.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637