Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars

On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Gary Shannon wrote:

> Suppose it were declared that no "functional" word may have more than two
> arguments?  The trivalent verbs would be seperated into two "functional"
> words.
> By keeping the stack of pending concepts to a maximum of two it becomes
> easier to parse the sentence on the fly in your head as you hear it uttered.
>
> Are their instances where this approach fails?
I have tried this, breaking up 3-argument predicates into 2 interlinked
2-argument predicates, and while it does work, natural laziness (which
is an advanced kind of efficiency) soon drops the 2nd predicate.
Another (better?) way to do it might be the trigger-language approach
of using only 1 core argument + lots of oblique args.
I've also been wondering whether a small verb can be incorporated
into each noun, like a case tag actually, and eliminate the main verb.
It seems that native languages of British Columbia do so.