Re: OT: Another analytic question

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@Y...> wrote:
> Are there any analytic natlangs (or conlangs) that
> completely mark the roles of the participants so that
> word order is (relatively) free? Or am I venturing
> into unexplored (or unproductive) territory?
Depends on what you mean by "roles".  As we discussed
some time back, there is no agreement on how many roles
there are; indeed, some people have suggested that the
number of roles is equal to the number of distinct verbs.
As for case being marked analytically, yes, this is
common among Polynesian languages, who have an ergative
absolutive alignment.

========================================================
Carsten wrote:
> > Are there any analytic natlangs (or conlangs) that
> > completely mark the roles of the participants so that
> > word order is (relatively) free? Or am I venturing
> > into unexplored (or unproductive) territory?
>
> This is called case marking
No, case-marking is distinct from role-marking.  Adpositions
may indicate roles, but they aren't cases.

> and is already used in the Real
> World. Swahili AFAIK even goes as far as marking verbs or
> so for both, subject and object in some way.
No, Swahili has no overt case-marking.  You're thinking of
head-agreement, which is something very different. (In fact,
there's reason to believe that the object markers of some
Bantu languages are incorporated pronouns, while the subject
markers are full agreement markers.)

=============================================================
From:    Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
> > Gary Shannon wrote:
> > What I'm wondering about is it seems like most
> > analytic languages rely heavily on word order to mark
> > roles, as in SVO, SOV, etc.
>
> I doubt SOV unless there are other makers to distinguish the
> object. But, yes, it does seem isolating languages tend to rely
> upon word order.
In fact, there's nothing in principle preventing a language being
caseless and hear-markingless.  SOV languages, for prosodic reasons,
tend to have more inflectional morphology, but by no means all of them
do.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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