Re: Marking nouns with person?

On 9/2/05, Thomas Wier <trwier@...> wrote:

> I've argued that these subject markers in Nahuatl -- at least in
> modern spoken Nahuatl -- are actually clitics, and therefore it's
> inappropriate to say that they are marking person on the noun.
> Launey, to be sure, thinks otherwise, but I think most linguists
> would think that his omnipredicativity hypothesis is wrong.
I think that it was a grammar of classical Nahuatl, but I can't
remember the author. I just picked it up when I was at the library one
day, but I hadn't paid my student fees so I couldn't check it out.

One of the languages I'm working on has a complex politeness system
where person is marked on honorifics and titles. I'm considering
adding person to all nouns and then declining the person suffixes for
case (with third person nominative being unmarked). It's very
intentionally odd, though - it's not spoken by humans.

I haven't worked on it much yet, so I haven't come across any logical
snags that such a system might cause.

--
Kate Sherwood
(Be sure to check reply-to!)

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