Re: ciantwo class system, verbs, & semantic roles

Ed Heil wrote:

> 2. For nouns of different animacy, the higher-animacy one is assigned
> the higher place in the role heirarchy.
> But what if you only want to move something one level up or down in
> the heirarchy?  For example, "the father offers the dog a master" with
> a verb for "offering someone something" with the roles OFFERER >
> RECIPIENT > THING-OFFERED.
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.