Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech

On Tue, 22 Aug 2006 11:11:50 -0400, Amanda Babcock Furrow
<langs@...> wrote:


>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?

I can provide you with a pair of examples in natlangs.

In Japanese there are:

- 'normal' verbs or "do^shi", which come in three closely related
conjugations (1: the -u ones like "kak-u" 'to write' and "kaer-u" 'to
return', 2: the -ru ones like "tabe-ru" 'to eat' and "mi-ru" 'to look', and
3: the irregular "suru" 'to do' and "kuru" 'to come')

- "i"-adjectives or "keiyo^shi" (like "aoi" '[to be] blue/green' and
"atarashii" '[to be] new'), very much like verbs but with their very
different conjugation

- "na"-adjectives or "keiyo^do^shi" (e.g. "shizuka na", ), not really
verbal, since they are used with the verb "desu" 'to be' (unlike the
"i"-adjectives which function fully as verbs in their own)

- attributive-only adjectives or "rentaishi" (such as "onaji", 'same'),
which cannot be predicated

As you can see, it is not possible to map the Japanese parts of speech of
"do^shi", "keiyo^shi", "keiyo^do^shi" and "rentaishi" into the English POS
of "verb" and "adjective", neither morphologically nor syntactically.

OTOH, in Russian there is a POS unknown in Western languages, lying halfway
between a verb and an adverb: the "category of state" or "kategoriya
sostoyaniya". These words express the state of a person or environment and
function as impersonal predicates. They are derived from adjectives by means
of the adverbial ending -o. For example, "t'emnyj/t'emnaja/t'emnoje" 'dark'
--> "t'emno" 'it is dark'.

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