Re: Language Sketch: Gogido

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
> Right. An alternative system (which results in exactly equivalent
> interpretations for my entire corpus so far, since I haven't taken
> advantage of the weirder ordering possibilities afforded by this
> system) is that anything unmarked before the verb is an agent, and
> anything unmarked after the verb is a patient.
> Hm. That's probably a better system, actually, since it allows you to
> elide any component without changing the rest of the sentence. Well,
> I'll decide for sure when I get to writing something where it actually
> makes a difference.
Would elided components mean "an unspecified agent did such-and-such
action to this patient" and "this agent did such-and-such
action to an unspecified patient" and "this agent did an unspecified
action to this patient"?   Or are there rules for figuring out a default
agent, verb, and patient when they're not explicit, e.g. the same
as in the last sentence?  If the latter, at least w.r.t. patients, you
would need transitivity marking.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article

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