Re: THEORY: two questions

At 18:42 29/03/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>>In a verb-final dependent-marking language, the same
>>sentence might come out:
>>
>>    boy-NOM   me-DAT   books-ACC   gave
>>
>>with case marking on the nouns (and overt pronouns), and
>>no agreement (or impoverished agreement) on the verb.
>
>How common are the various kinds of noun parameter marking on verbs in
>mostly head-marking languages? I.e. many Indo-European languages show
>subject agreement, but none that I know of have ever shown object
>agreement;
Really? I think I've read about an IE language (now extinct) that had
subject and object agreement. I may be wrong though. But IIRC, some IE
languages have now mixed ergative if not completely ergative systems, so I
wouldn't be surprised if I saw an IE language with agreement with both
subject and object. Spoken French is not far from this state I think (for
instance: "Je vois cet homme" is the correct form, but "Je le vois, cet
homme" is very common in Spoken French, with the pause indicated by the
comma often disappearing. As "je" and "le" are really agreement prefixes on
the verb ("Je vois" is pronounced [Zvwa] and "je le vois" [Zl@vwa] or
[Z@lvwa]) One can say that French is leaning towards subject and object
agreement.

 I think I read that Arabic marks the direct object on the verb
>but not the subject. Would it make much sense to have verbs that only have
>dative agreement? I might do that in Dhak but leave off the nominative and
>accusative.
>
As far as I know, Arabic verbs agree with the subject. They only use object
suffixes when the object is a personal pronoun. That's also the current
state of Written French. But maybe Spoken Arabic (a mirage, there is not
one but many "Spoken Arabic" languages) is like Spoken French in this respect.

Funny, the more I learn about French and the more its structure looks
exotic compared to other Romance languages...

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)