> I thought a little about this idea of marking tense
> on
> the noun.
>
> To me, from a practical point of view, there
> shouldn't
> be real problems to do so, except that you have to
> choose which noun would be affected. In "The guy
> shot
> the sheriff with a revolver", will it be "the guy",
> "the sheriff" or "the revolver" ? Or two of them ?
> Or
> the three of them ? While normally in a predicate
> there is only one verb, thus it is easier to mark
> the
> verb. One can suppose that it would rather be the
> subject that would be marked: "The guy-PAST shoot
> the
> sheriff with a revolver", if needed.
>
> I think sometimes it makes sense to mark a noun (be
> it
> subject or not) with tense, for ex in : "Who wants
> yersterday's papers ?", or "I (meaning: the little
> boy
> that I was at that time) was scared in the dark".
> But
> IMO, when a sentence is in the past, or in the
> future,
> it usually means that all of its elements are
> considered as in the past, or in the future. So the
> real choice is, either marking the verb, as the
> centre
> and most important term of the sentence, either the
> whole sentence, by adding a separate word, for ex at
> the beginning or at the end of it:
> PAST the guy shoot the sheriff with a revolver.
> This would be a kind of factorization: PAST (the guy
> shoot the sheriff with a revolver), just like in: y
> =
> x(a+b+c) = xa + xb + xc.
>
> I don't mean that natlangs behave like that, I just
> mean that, from a logical point of view, this is
> what
> I probably would do.
>
> In Russian, the mark for conditional is a separate
> word, "by". So why should tenses not be separate
> words
> too ?
>
> (NB. About ergative, it came back to me that I
> already
> posted a whole theory about it on this list some
> weeks
> ago, and had forgotten it. It was when I read the
> expression 'split ergative' that I remembered it).
>
> --- Jim Grossmann <jimg4732@...> wrote:
> > Mark P. Line wrote:
> >
> > "That said, I think it's [marking tense on the
> noun
> > is] 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). 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."
> >
> > Jim G. wrote:
> >
> > When I read this, the first thing that came to my
> > mind was a system in which
> > vowel-alternation was used to mark proximate vs.
> > remote AND past, present,
> > and future. In this nonce-language, assume that
> all
> > the vowels are
> > syllabic:
> >
> > v-dors (dog)
> >
> > -a- proximate
> > -i- remote
> >
> > -u- past
> > -o- present
> > -e- future
> >
> > vaudors this-dog-in-the-past
> > vaodors this-dog-in-the-present
> > vaedors this-dog-in-the-future
> >
> > viudors that-dog-in-the-past
> > viodors that-dog-in-the-present
> > viedors that-dog-in-the-future
> >
> > Yes, I'm assuming that only nouns or pronouns
> would
> > carry past, present, or
> > future markers.
> >
> > I threw proximate vs. remote into the mix because,
> > to me, it seemed pleasing
> > and "natural" in a very broad esthetic sense to
> pair
> > information about
> > location in time relative to the moment of the
> > utterance with information
> > about the literal or figurative spatial
> > relationships that the referents of
> > the nouns have to the speaker. I couldn't help
> > picturing imaginary
> > hillbillies saying things like "that then dog"
> > instead of "that there dog."
> >
> > Would the foregoing illustrate tense marking on
> the
> > nouns?
> >
> > Jim G.
>
>
> =====
> Philippe Caquant
>
> "High thoughts must have high language."
> (Aristophanes, Frogs)
>
>
>
>
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