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Re: THEORY: two questions

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 29, 2000, 7:23
At 09:24 28/03/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Matt Pearson wrote: > >> Depends on who you ask. My definition: A head-marking >> language is one which keeps track of arguments (who did >> what to whom) primarily by means of agreement on the verb, >> while a dependent-marking language keeps track of arguments >> primarily by means of case-marking on the noun phrases. > >Analogously, languages with genitives are dependent-marking, >whereas languages with "construct state" nouns are head-marking? > >And what are English and Mandarin: neither-marking? They look >more like dependent-marking to me, but not according to the >above definition. >
Well, word order can be also mark grammatical relationships, so in the case of English and Mandarin, I would say that they are rather dependent-marking, even with the definition given. It depends if you consider word order as a kind of "case marking" or not. 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)