Re: ciantwo class system, verbs, & semantic roles

Charles wrote:

> What about promoting a noun by affixing it, not affixing the verb?
> ... man dog.ERG see = the dog, oddly, was the see-er of the man.
> You'd have case tags that get dropped whenever animacy defaults OK.
That's good, though I'd rather not make them "case tags" strictly
speaking -- because I don't want "cases" strictly speaking.

Perhaps any noun can be kicked up into a higher class -- e.g. dog
could get promoted to human so that it can be equal in animacy to the
human and word order can let it take the higher role (experiencer):

dog.HUMAN man see

That seems a bit clumsy though. I don't want to have to turn my dog
into a human just so he can look at me.

It'd be easy if I was always dealing with two-role verbs; I'd have a
"pseudo-passive" affix on the verb that reverses the two roles (i.e.
"see" would become an "OBJECT > EXPERIENCER" rather than an
"EXPERIENCER > OBJECT" verb.

But with the possibility of three-role verbs, that's not so easy...
wait.  Maybe I could *juggle* the three roles!  Have an affix that
demotes the verb's normal first role to the bottom of the heirarchy!

So give (GIVER > RECIPIENT > GIFT) would become (RECIPIENT > GIFT >
GIVER).

Ugh.  No.  That doesn't help.  You're basically never going to want
to have a giver of *lower* animacy than a gift.  How about an affix
that just juggles the first two roles of a verb, and when that doesn't
work, go for periphrasis?....


+ Ed Heil ---------------------- edheil@postmark.net +
|    "What matter that you understood no word!       |
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