Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech

Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> wrote:

> My current conlang ngwaalq has additional word classes
> not found in English: noun classifiers and verb classifiers.
> These are closed classes (about 50 items in each) which
> have distinct distributional and morphological properties
> to verbs and nouns: namely, noun and verb classifiers
> are the locus of nominal and verbal inflectional morphology
> respectively, and can occur independently (nouns and verbs
> require a classifier, but noun and verb classifiers do not
> require anything explicit to classify).
I'm familiar with noun classifiers, though I can't think of any
natlangs that use them as the base for inflection vs the noun, but I've
never heard of verb classifiers - could you give a couple examples of
each to help us wrap our minds around the idea?

I'm picturing verb classifiers as generalized (or so-called 'light')
verbs that convey notions like 'motion', 'change of state', 'reflexive
action', 'transitive action', 'direct causation', 'accidental action',
'repetitive process/action', etc. Am I in the ballpark, or did you have
something different in mind?

Pfal

Reply