Re: Triggeriness ...

>I think it is a mistake to try to correlate trigger languages with those
>with "case". I see no evidence there is case (in the traditional sense).
>The nouns are simply marked as the focus (of course we can play the
>semantics game), But i think trying to think of triggers like cases is
>only asking for confusion in working with these languages.
Why? 'Trigger' is just a case marked by a preposition.
But if you only consider as "cases" those marked by
bound morphemes (like Latin and Greek), then we are
left with the need for a label for the general concept
that in some occasions is marked by bound case affixes,
in other by unbound case adpositions and in others by
mere word order. Limiting the label "case" to just
one particular occurrence of the concept doesn't help
in realizing that we're dealing with one same linguistic
phenomenon here, though presented under different
'disguises'.


>I don't know, maybe i just *get* it, but the way triggers are used seems
>easy to me, and i never see why they're so confusing to lots of other
>people.
>
>In other words, don't try to think of it in terms of what you know of
>Indo-European languages. It just won't work and will confuse the hell out
>of you. Keep it simple.
Where did you see any attempt from my part to reduce
the thing to Indo-European grammar? I think I've
done precisely the contrary: to go beyond European
assumptions and generalize the concepts of case and
voice so as to cover the different occurences of
the same notion in non-IE languages, and thus make
evident that things like "trigger" are not unique
grammatical notions unconnected to other grammatical
phenomena in other languages, but just the particular
manifestation in that language of the general
linguistic phenomena of case and voice.

Cheers,
Javier