Re: minimalistic grammar

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>>>
En réponse à Andrew Strader <guido@...>:
> For what it's worth, I've been toying with minimalistic but fully
> expressive
> grammars. I managed to boil it down to 7 or 8 rules, but I didn't try it
> out
> yet. I just wondered if anyone else had already attempted such a thing,
> and
> managed to use fewer rules, or had to use more?
My Notya could be said to have no more than two grammatical rules :)) . Search
the archives for "Notya", I already extensively described the language to the
list.
<<<
I think Notya has this "word activation" system. Or am i wrong? I find that
system very naturalistic because predicates are often understandable only with
reference to all the actions an argument may perform in real life.
If "minimalistic grammar" means less mandatory tags, then i first made Tunu
minimalistic too--with 2 mandatory tags for predicate and substuff. But there
are many optional tags and 3 rules regarding word order (SVO,
determinee-determiner, quantity-quality). Plus, i indulged in designing an
optional verbal voice system--with a passive voice even*!!!--, so i guess i'm
out and fairly average on the list. :-) Anyway, i think the number of rules
required to describe a lang depends on the learning target. for instance, if i
explained Tunu to a Khmer i wouldn't need to list rules like "adjectives and
adverbs are plain verbs", "words don't inflect", "there is no tag for genitive",
etc. Having to refer to "adjective", "plural" and the like to write up a
minimalistic grammar is a pain.
*I made the passive voice because i wanted to be able to express passive in
compound words, but over the time i've realized it doesn't make much difference
and now i understand why japanese and indonesian compound words don't feature
passive components.
Oh! and btw, Andrew, check Khmer if you want something maximalistically
minimalistic, and broken Indonesian if you need something workable :-)
Mathias
www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm

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