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Re: THEORY: two questions

From:<myth@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2000, 0:53
On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, dirk elzinga wrote:

[ snip interesting data ]
> > She has this to say about the table: "Statistically significant > patterns emerge when we use a two-way breakdown of head/ > dependent types and leave out the languages with unknown or no > basic word order; the significance levels shown in table 21 were > determined in this way. Verb-initial order and unknown order or > lack of any basic order pattern together, favoring head marking. > Verb-medial and verb-final order pattern together, favoring > dependent marking." (p 105) > > Tepa, being both primarily head-marking and verb-initial, fits > in with these statistical trends. >
Phew. Okay, that's cool then. Doraja is/may be/will be the same way, to some degree. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to end up with something entirely unnatural. Thanks for the reference. :)
> But this doesn't really answer your question. I think Matt > suggested animacy as a possible agreement category for verbs and > their objects; another possibility is to have classificatory > verbs, à la Navajo. That is, the verb stem changes depending on > the shape, texture, etc of the object. >
The latter (Navajo agreement) sounds most interesting. I'm not sure what exactly is meant by "animacy," however -- can anyone give some specific nat/conlang examples? Thanks, Adam