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Re: linguolabials (was: Re: Hell hath no Fury)

From:Shreyas Sampat <nsampat@...>
Date:Thursday, June 14, 2001, 11:59
>I invented a freakfest of a conlang a few years back that included both a >linguolabial trill and a linguolabial click. It had a full series of
trills
>and clicks/pops from the lips to the glottis. It used whistles for vowels. >It also featured a "pro-verb" and forbade transitive verbs. Like I said -- >a freakfest.
A pro-verb? Like the following:? He fell off the cliff. He2 (proverb)-ed too. where the proverb essentially acts like the English 'do', and absorbs whatever arguments are overwritten, or like: He ate pizza. She (proverb)-ed gummybears. where the proverb is just a verb? In either case, what a brilliantly useful idea! How miraculous! A hollow verb! (I'm being excitable. Pardon.) On pro-forms: What other pro-things are there? Pronouns, of course, are all over the place. IMO this is possible because a noun tends to be used repeatedly in a discourse, and so methods are devised to avoid that. On the other hand, verbs are usually unrepeated for reasonable periods, and so when a proverb is used it's going to be either in a poetic context or such that the antecedent's been forgotten, or possibly in a me-too construction. When a pro-device is used, how does one find the antecedent? Is it always the nearest convenient thing, perhaps at the same level of clause nesting, mm? --- Shreyas

Replies

John Cowan <jcowan@...>
J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...>pro-forms (was: Re: linguolabials)