Re: isolating conlangs

Hi,

  <<
  If you follow this line of reason, the question becomes, is there
  any difference between syntax and morphology?  Many Chomskyan
  linguists have said "no"...
  >>

 I think there is a subtle difference. Morphology only affects a word or root
neighboring it (or neighboring neighbor affix), while certain words with
grammatical usage may affect a word at the other end of the sentence. Surely no
one defines a word as being separable into scattered parts all over a sentence?

  -Leon

"David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@...> wrote:  Leon wrote:
<<
I am, in fact my goal is to make it completly isolating, no
"morphology" at all. Sometimes I wonder if agglutinating and
isolating  are really two different things, I mean you could just
define a word to  include surrounding particles and then your
isolating language has  magically transformed into an agglutinating one!
 >>

If you follow this line of reason, the question becomes, is there
any difference between syntax and morphology?  Many Chomskyan
linguists have said "no", and have tried to explain morphology
through the syntactic frameworks they've come up with.  I'm
almost ready to give the same response, but would suggest that
rather than using a syntactic framework to explain morphology,
we should use a morphological framework to explain what we
currently call "syntax".

I say "almost" because I haven't worked through it myself fully
enough.  I need to really get down to it and do some serious
thinking and decide what it is that I believe before I can say
anything about anything else.

-David
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