Re: THEORY: two questions

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
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