Re: THEORY: two questions

>Question number one. Is there any typological correlation between word
>order and head-/dependent-marking tendencies?  That is, would a
>head-initial language be more likely to be head-marking or
>dependent-marking?  Same question for head-final languages.
A colleague of mine and I here in the linguistics department were racking
our brains about this one, and as far as we could determine, based on our
collective knowledge of the world's languages, there's no significant
correlation.  I can think of at least one head-marking and one dependent-
marking language for each word order type:

Verb-initial, head-marking:     Marshallese, Chamorro (?)
Verb-initial, dep-marking:      Tagalog, Polynesian lgs
Verb-medial, head-marking:      Swahili, Mohawk
Verb-medial, dep-marking:       Russian
Verb-final, head-marking:       Lakhota, many Papuan lgs
Verb-final, dep-marking:        Japanese, Yidiny

So I guess you have your choice...

>Question number two. I've decided that Doraya verbs need to have some
>sort of agreement with their dependent NPs.  However, I'd like to have
>something more original than a simple agreement with the person of the
>subject.  Any ideas for something more exotic?
This isn't exactly agreement, but in Tokana, there are a number of
verb pairs which have the same basic meaning, but differ on whether
the subject is animate or inanimate.  For example, the word for "sit" is
"uitha" if you're speaking of an animate object and "utima" if you're
speaking of an inanimate object.

Matt.