Re: THEORY: two questions

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