Re: THEORY: two questions

At 05:02 PM 3/27/2000 -0600, Matt Pearson wrote:
> >What's head-marking and dependent-marking again?
>
>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.
Wow, what a coincidence that I read this today, since today Dhak went from
being head-marking to dependent-marking virtually instantaneously, and I
didn't even know the terminology for that :)


>In a verb-final dependent-marking language, the same
>sentence might come out:
>
>    boy-NOM   me-DAT   books-ACC   gave
>
>with case marking on the nouns (and overt pronouns), and
>no agreement (or impoverished agreement) on the verb.
How common are the various kinds of noun parameter marking on verbs in
mostly head-marking languages? I.e. many Indo-European languages show
subject agreement, but none that I know of have ever shown object
agreement; I think I read that Arabic marks the direct object on the verb
but not the subject. Would it make much sense to have verbs that only have
dative agreement? I might do that in Dhak but leave off the nominative and
accusative.