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Re: movement

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Monday, March 27, 2006, 16:24
On 3/26/06, Jackson Moore <jacksonmoore@...> wrote:
> My questions for the moment concern variable word order, which seems > to be a fairly constrained mechanism for expressing grammatical > meaning. Its uses in English are apparently limited to voice and > mood, and idiosyncratically at that. > > Are there any constructed languages that were designed to maximize or > systematize the portion of grammatical meaning expressed through the > variation of word order? How do analytic natural languages differ in > the way they permutate word order? Are there languages, constructed > or natural, in which it is used for purposes other than voice and mood?
In one of my early conlangs I had adpositions which were prepositional when expressing location and postpositional when expressing movement (or the other way around; I don't recall). I don't think it would work well in practice; it would be too often ambigous (is this particle expressing movement toward the previous noun or location at the following noun? etc) -- unless maybe the adpositions inflect as they move from one position to another, in which case why bother to move them if the inflection fully marks their change of directionality and therefore meaning? OTOH, maybe a language that is typically prepositional could use its prepositions postpositionally when they form a sentential adverbial complement that comes at the beginning of the sentence. In a current, still fairly sketchy conlang I have adjectives following the noun ordinarily, but preceding it when emphatic. I think I've read somewhen in this list about a conlang that would use the six V/S/O order variations to systematically express mood (maybe some tense and aspect as well?). I think maybe it had dummy subjects and objects to fill slots as needed for intransitive and impersonal verbs and still have the full specificication of work order for marking mood. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>