Re: quadrivalent verb

On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:23:10 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:
>On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 1:57 PM, deinx nxtxr <deinx.nxtxr@...>
>wrote:
>> Check out Lojban.  Some definitions that are pentavalent.
>
>There must be some with even more parameters than that, aren't there?
>But I don't think Lojban or similar loglangs really count in this
>regard.  They try to account for all possible arguments as explicit
>parameters, whereas most languages just use generic tack-on modifiers
>that aren't tied to a specific verb.
>
>--
>Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Aren't some of Lojban's words even hexavalent?  I thought that 6 participants
was Lojban's maximum.

There may indeed be other conlangs with more than six, for all I know.

As for natlangs;

Linguists who actually think grammatical relations are important and useful
cross-linguistically tend to think that the maximum number of grammatical
relations in natlangs is 4, and the minimum is 1.

Those linguists who think some languages have none at all and some have
more than four, tend to be a subset of those linguists who think that
grammatical relations are useless in describing many languages, and of limited
use in describing most languages.

I have read an article (sorry I forget the title and editor of the book and the
title of the chapter) in which some linguist (sorry I forget who) argued that
some Native North American language (sorry I forget which one, but I think it
began with Ch? or at least with C? Maybe Choctaw or Cherokee or Creek?) has
(up to) seven.  S/he (I think it was a "he") clearly was among those who
thought that GRs were not usually worth the time spent on them.

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