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Syntactic differences within parts of speech

From:Amanda Babcock Furrow <langs@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 22, 2006, 15:11
I've been intrigued lately (the past six months?) by discussions on the
list which expose variations in the syntax of words considered to be of
the same part of speech.  For example, the interesting discussion of
the syntax of "ago", or discussions of the syntactics of gerunds versus
participles in English (such as that gerunds are commonly thought to be
operating as nouns, but in fact retain some aspects of verbs with respect
to their arguments, etc.)

Sorry for any vagueness or impenetrability above; I'm not getting enough
sleep.

At any rate, I want to be able to apply this level of detail to a conlang,
maybe even to the extent of devising a grammar with more parts of speech
(and I mean open classes - creating a small closed class is easy) than we
are used to.  But I need ideas.  Does anyone know of a resource (preferably
online, or in books I already own ;) which addresses the detailed syntactics
of parts of speech, or of groups of words within a part of speech, ideally
with examples in English?

Also, who can provide similar examples from their conlangs?  Does your
conlang have an extra part of speech (two separate kinds of verbs,
perhaps, which operate differently)?  Does it contain subclasses within
parts of speech (verbs, perhaps, that can't be nominalized?  Yes, I'm
rather stuck on verbs...)  Words which don't fit into any part of speech
in the language?  Any other relevant examples or thoughts?

Thanks,
Amanda

Replies

taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Sylvia Sotomayor <terjemar@...>
Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>