Re: Inflection for attitude and purpose (was: Re: Nauradi)

On 11/29/08, Ollock Ackeop <ollock@...> wrote:
> For the attitudes, it might be more useful to come up with the declinations and
>  define what situations they're used in.
Having come up with the list of attitudes marked, there will be
a continual process of figuring out what situations they're used
in as I use and develop the language; ten attitude markings
can't cover all the range of human emotions with precision.

> Also, why mark emotional "attitudes" on
>  nouns?  You don't necessarily need an answer, I'd just think it would be more
>  likely marked on verbs or the whole sentence (I don't have data on that,
>  though).
gzb has ways to mark attitude on any content word, with optional suffixes,
or on the clause as a whole, with optional adverbs.  I most commonly use
the attitudinal suffixes on nouns.  One might have distinct attitudes toward
the various entities involved in a situation, vs. toward the situation as a
whole.  In this conlang (yet unnamed) I'm trying how it works to mark
attitude on every noun.

It would be interesting to mark attitude on verbs as well, as in Alex's conlang
Vladician; I haven't ruled that out.

Ithkuil marks attitude on verbs as its morphological category "bias"
( http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Ch-6%20More%20Verb%20Morphology.htm#Sec6o6 );
though this isn't exactly the same as the range of attitudes I use
derived attitudinal adverbs for in gzb.  It includes some biases
which I would consider forms of validationality, e.g. "ironic".

Lojban has a set of attitudinal particles which, as best I understand
them, apply to a clause as a whole.  Those, and the Esperanto
-acx-- and -cxj- / -nj- suffixes, were the main inspiration for gzb's
attitudinal system.

Hixkaryana has several attitudinal adverbs, part of a class of
particles that also includes evidentiality / validationality particles.
Several IE natlangs have more or less productive affectionate affixes,
sometimes doubling as diminutives, and some have one or more
productive derivational processes for pejoration.

>  Also, I would have gone with your original idea and used noun classes for the
>  "purposes" (and maybe added interest with a few arbitrary assignments), but
>  inflections could work.
I haven't ruled that out, but I'm trying it as an inflectional category for now.
For instance, I might not need distinct words for "tool" and "work of art" if
I inflect a basic word for "thing" in appropriate ways.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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