Re: Agents and patients

At 11:48 13/03/00 -0300, you wrote:
>
>I only have AGT, PAT, ABL and DAT, and I'm somehow seeing
>a hierarchy -- in that order. Does this make sense? Any
>problems with this mad scheme? (As for ambiguity: I can
>live with it, plus I have adpositions to enhance the broad
>meaning of the cases, if needed.) Help of any kind would
>be appreciated.
>
It looks rather like my scheme for Itakian, which has triggers for agent,
patient, source (your ABL) and destination (your DAT), except that for me,
a sentence with 'see' would be:

They-DESTINATION see the house-SOURCE (well, in fact it's a trigger system,
so it's even different. I'm still working on the details: the morphemes
:((( ).

The scheme in itself is no problem I think. But I think you should change
your ABL and DAT for less misleading forms like my destination and source
(except if they are really used as ablative and dative in other contexts -
personnally I also have a dative trigger and a genitive trigger which is
also used like an ablative, so it wasn't possible).

If anyone's interested, I can talk about the destination and source in
Itakian: they are vital to describe how adjectives are rendered in Itakian.
In case someone's interested... :)

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)