Re: Syntactic differences within parts of speech

* Amanda Babcock Furrow said on 2006-08-22 17:11:50 +0200
> 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.
/snip/
> 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?
There's the series  Timothy Shopen edited (borrow, don't buy): "Language
typology and syntactic description". As in most works of descriptive
linguistics, you won't find only English examples though.

> Also, who can provide similar examples from their conlangs?
It is possible to analyze Taruven such that it has two open
word-classes: statives (adjectives) and experiencer-verbs. Verbs and
nouns are then basically subsets of statives, while all/most of the
closed-class words derive from the experiencer-verbs (which, really,
really ought to be renamed complement(ed)-verbs. One of these days...)

Furthermore there's a closed class of words (tentatively) called
front-words. These must always be the first word in a clause if used at
all.

One definite goal of Taruven is to do away with adverbs. This does have
a discernible effect on the entire system :) Adverbs truly is a class of
"leftovers", ripe for splitting up into smaller classes.

You might find interesting discussions about word classes on Language Log
btw. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/


t.