Re: Tense marked on nouns

Hello everybody once again! Semester is over except
for exams now so I should have enough time to read the
list.

 --- "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
...
> The only instance of morphological TAM *marking* on
> nouns that I would be
> prepared to accept would be when a noun, not the
> verb, carries the TAM
> marking for a clause. I've never encountered a
> language that does this,
> and none of the compendious catalogues of
> grammatical structure (written
> by groups of descriptive linguists who've *really*
> been around...) include
> the possibility IIRC, so I would be surprised if I
> did encounter this
> phenomenon. (Although situations with clitics are
> surely common enough --
> as in the case of English.)
>
> That said, I think it's an *awesome* idea for a
> conlang. It's different
> enough from the way natlangs work to be intriguing,
> while not so different
> that it would prevent usage (unlike, say,
> unrestricted center embedding).
My first conlang that tried to be a serious conlang,
Finnstek, did exactly this. The subject of a sentence
carried the tense (and conversely, the word that
carried the tense was the subject of the sentence).
The inflexions derived from an inflected form of a
word translated as 'to do', via, of course, a stage in
which it was an enclitique. In the Finnstek dialect
Finnzsa, something odd happened in some contexts that
made the Finnzsa tense more of a clitique than an
inflexion, but I can't remember what...

I didn't find it intriguing so much as fun, though :)

> Lots of natlangs have clause-level markers on nouns,
> after all -- but they
> tend to be involved with valence assignment and/or
> pragmatic functions
> that are more-or-less intimately tied up with the
> noun being marked.
...

--
Tristan.

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