Re: Nouns with arguments, verbs without arguments

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 21:53:58 -0500, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>> Well, I don't know if there is any language with verbs that cannot take any
>> argument (but that wouldn't surprise me with impersonal verbs like
>> indeed "rain").
>
>Spanish verbs like _llover_ (I think that's the word) have no arguments,
>do they?
>
>The nouns remind me of classifiers in langs like Chinese or Japanese,
>some of which can only occur with numbers, e.g., _sannin onna_
>(three-person woman).  _Nin_ can't occur by itself.
Actually, some of the Lindiga nouns-with-arguments could be thought of as
classifiers: "koti tlazik riacha" (two sheets of paper) is roughly like
"liang3 zhang1 zhi3". It seems that the kind of nouns "tlazi" takes as
arguments are ones that can't be counted on their own. But "tlazi" can
occur without a number, and classifiers of this sort aren't as common in
Lindiga as they are in Chinese or Japanese (but possibly more common than
in English). I have a feeling that once I learn more of the Lindiga
vocabulary, I'll start finding more of these words that aren't much like
classifiers.

It's also possible that some of these Lindiga nouns are also like
Christophe's nouns with mandatory possession in Chasmäöcho. Tirelat has
quite a few of those (which similarly include body parts and family
members, and also words like "home", "enemy", and "dream").

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