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

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 26, 2002, 2:33
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). -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin