Re: Plurality

On Thursday, April 17, 2003, at 04:53  AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:

> Staving Mike Karapcik:
>> | -----Original Message-----
>> | From: H. S. Teoh
>> | Subject: Plurality
>> |
>> | An interesting thought occurred to me today. I've noticed
>> | that in languages that mark number on the verb, the number
>> | agrees with the number of the subject/agent. But has
>> | anyone thought about marking the number of the *object*
>> | on the verb instead? How possible is it to have the verb
>> | agree with the subject on person, but agree with the
>> | *object* on number?
>>
>>         Agree with person for the subject, but number for object?
>>         Hmmm... That sounds like it would be quite rare.
>>
>>         In some languages (I think Georgian for one, and some South
>> American languages), there is a set of affixes that indicate person
>> and
>> number for both subject and object. Klingon also does this.
>>
>>         From my very scant knowledge of Muskogee, some verbs have verb
>> root clusters, with different roots for a verb if the object is
>> singular
>> or plural. The person marker agreed with the subject, but for a few
>> verbs, the root agreed with the number of the object. This is probably
>> the closest think I know of to what you are talking about.
>
> Oh, dear I've just thought of something really evil.
> Verbs are marked for number with respect to subject and object, but
> this
> refers to incidences of the action, with the following meanings
>
> Subject is      Verb is                 Meaning
> Singular        Singular wrt subject    He does
> Singular        Plural wrt subject      She does several times
> Plural          Singular wrt subject    They all do together
> Plural          Plural wrt subject      They each do individually
>
> Verb is         Object is       Meaning
> Singular wrt object     Singular        It is done to it
> Singular wrt object     Plural          It is done to them all together
> Plural wrt object       Singular        It is done to it many times
> Plural wrt object       Plural          It is done to each of them
> individually
>
> Now which language can I fit this into?
In Miapimoquitch, number is a category which marks predicates rather
than their arguments, so there is some ambiguity when confronted with a
sentence like:

wankikipe
wa= n-  RED-  kipe
1=  TR- PAUC- poke

(TR 'transitive', PAUC 'paucal number')

This can mean any of the following:

"I poked (a few of) them."
"We [=a few of us] poked him."
"We [=a few of us] poked (a few of) them."
"I poked him a few times."

In each of these interpretations the idea is that poking took place a
few times; context is generally sufficient to disambiguate. In addition
to paucal, there are also distributive and collective numbers.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie

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