Re: Plurality

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?

Pete

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