Re: Theta Role Question

Hi!

Carsten Becker writes:
>...
> Ob-Conlang: How do your conlangs treat such stative
> constructions -- given that your respective conlangs are
> heavily case marking and not using an active/split-S
> alignment?
Fukhian is nominative/accusative and basically handles this by
defining the case<->role mapping in the lexicon, and since it was my
first conlang where I did not think about this too much, it is pretty
much like in German.  With one exception: if nouns are used
predicatively, it marks them with a special 'predicative' case,
instead of using two nominatives as, e.g., German.  E.g.:

  Mis goneh.
  mis.0   gon.eh
  man.NOM machine.PRED
  'The man is a machine.'

(BTW, word order is quite free: 'Goneh mis' would mean the same.)

There is a copula, but actually I don't anymore know what I needed it
for, since a) it is optional in all situations, b)
tense/aspect/mood/person is an enclitic attaching to the first word of
the sentence, whatever it is, so it does not need a copula to have a
syntactic verb to attach to.


Tesäfköm only has univalent verbs and only one lexical class, so every
word can be used as a verb or as a noun.  The basic structure of the
language are noun-verb pairs, since every verb takes exactly one
argument:

   man-drink  'The man drinks'

I call such pairs 'adverbs' (and there are a few lexical adverbs,
too), and a clause is then a sequence of adverbs (similar to a serial
verb construction):

   man-drink beer-disappear.   'The man drinks beer.'

So verbs are role markers and the nouns are marked with them.  Now in
the above case, you'd use 'machine' as a verd/role marker and mark
'man' (used as a noun) with it to express 'The man is a machine.':

   man-machine.     'The man is a machine.'

Whether a verbal usage of a substantive is static or not does not
matter in morphology, only semantically, so 'machine' behaves just
like 'to drink':

   man-machine.     'The man is a machine.'
   man-drink.       'The man drinks.'

(All lexicon entries will probably be static, and anything else will
be derived by additional morphemes.)


My other conlangs are either fluid-S or Germanic or Romance.

**Henrik