Re: # of possible verb declensions (was gotten, boughten)

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 15:55:26 -0400, Jake X <alwaysawake247@...>
wrote:

><<This is why I hate English.  5,104 different possible constructions of the
>same verb.>>
>Assuming you made up that number (there can't be THAT many), I'm starting to
>wonder what number of verb forms there ARE for any English verb. Has anyone
>actually studied this? What is the average number of possible verb forms in
>a said conlang? Mine (elanagauo) is the following:
It isn't easy to say: for one thing, I haven't yet defined all the possible
forms. I don't yet have plural forms of accusative pronoun prefixes, for
instance, and I haven't yet decided whether that's a feature of Tirelat or
just a gap in the description. Whether an evidential suffix has separate
forms for past and nonpast is also undetermined in a couple of cases. But
there are currently around 11 personal pronoun prefixes, 3 voices (active,
passive, middle), 14 evidential/tense suffixes (which can optionally be
followed by a negative or question suffix), and 2 aspects. There is also a
"null" form distinct from "negative", used for instance in answering loaded
questions where either a "yes" or "no" answer would be untruthful, for a
total of 3,696 forms. Then there are the 5 modal suffixes (which fall into
the evidential/tense slot), for an additional 1,320 forms, and the positive
and negative imperative forms. So the total number of possible forms is
5,018. Whether all of these are actually useful is debatable. This isn't
even counting suffixes like causative and cessative, which are considered
to be derivational rather than inflectional (although the line between the
two isn't very clear in this case; there's a very good chance that
"intention" will turn out to be a derivational suffix rather than a mode).

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