Re: THEORY: two questions

Adam wrote:

>> 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, ý 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?
I already gave an example from my conlang Tokana.  In Tokana, certain
verbs come in pairs, where one verb is used with animate subjects and
the other verb is used with inanimate subjects.  For example, "sit" is
"uitha" if talking about people or animals, and "tasiha" if talking about
things:

Ne mikal uitha iteh nyumei
the boy sit the-DAT ground-DAT
"The boy is sitting on the ground"

Te kopo tasiha iteh nyumei
the vase sit the-DAT ground-DAT
"The vase is sitting on the ground"

This is just a residual feature of Tokana.  But if you wanted to, you
could build an entire agreement system around whether the subject is
animate or inanimate.

Another thing I've been toying around with for an as-yet-unnamed
sketch:  Mark the verb to indicate the number of the subject and object,
and whether or not plural subjects and objects are acting collectively
(together) or distributively (one at a time).  A sample paradigm made
up on the spot:

-0      "singular subj acts on sing obj"
-nga    "plural subj acts together on sing obj"
-ngei   "plural subj acts one-by-one on sing obj"

-i      "singular subj acts on collection of obj"
-inga   "plural subj acts together on collection of obj"
-ingei  "plural subj acts one-by-one on collection of obj"

etc.

Examples:

mah     "he sees it"
mah-nga "they see it (all together)"
mah-ngei        "they see it (one at a time)"

mah-i   "he sees them all together"
mah-inga        "they (all together) see them all together"
mah-ingei       "they see them all together (one at a time)"

Matt.