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Re: THEORY: two questions

From:<myth@...>
Date:Tuesday, March 28, 2000, 1:45
On Mon, 27 Mar 2000, 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. > That is, "head" = the verb, while "dependents" = the noun > phrases. >
It was my impression that the terms also applied to grammatical categories besides just verbs -- that is, prepositional phrases, possessive constructions, and noun phrases can be classified as head-marking or dependent-marking as well. Welsh's inflecting prepositions would be a good example of head-marking in a prepositional phrase: arna i; arno fo; arni hi on-1s me on-3sm him; on-3sf her Here the head of the prepositional phrase (the preposition) is being marked, instead of the dependent -- that is, the head carries the information about the relationship between the head and the dependent. This would contrast with something like, oh, say, Latin, where the head (the preposition) remains invariable and the dependent (the noun) gets the morphology: in silvam; in silva: in forest-abl in forest-acc into the forest in the forest Then there are the languages that are head-marking in possessive constructions, the classic example of which is Hungarian: az ember haz-a the man house-3s (dep) (head) This contrasts with English, which has the morphology on the dependent instead of the head: the man's house (dep) (head) Finally, there's head-marking between nouns and their adjectives, which totally blew me away when I saw it in class. Of course, languages that are mark the dependent adjectives in NPs are a dime a dozen, i.e. French: l'homme heureux; la femme heureuse; les femmes heureuses the man happy-s.masc the woman happy-s.fem the women happy-pl.fem But what blew me away was that apparently, in Farsi, it goes the other way -- the head noun is marked when there are dependent adjectives (this example is actually taken from another article by Nichols, heh): kuh-e boland mountain-DEP high (head) (dep) This <-e> suffix is apparently only used when the noun has an adjective. And apparently this structure is pretty rare cross-linguistically, but it's cool beyond imagination, and I'm convinced at this point that it deserves a place in Doraja. For example: dae enin geda I like cheese I like cheese. dae enin geda-i kyla I like cheese-DEP blue I like blue cheese. I'd also probably have it for nouns with relative clauses: dae enin geda-i sao sen te fes I like cheese-DEP that-nom be on table I like the cheese that's on the table. Or something like that. (Comments on this? Can anyone off-hand think of other natlangs/conlangs that work this way?) Later, Adam