Re: Ideas for deriving verbs from nouns

En réponse à Amanda Babcock <langs@...>:

> Hello, longtime lurker here, asking for pointers to helpful
> examples...
>
Hello, welcome back!

> Recently I thought I'd clean up my old conlang sketches.  The plan was
> to
> take the phonology sketch from 3 years ago, the grammar sketch from
> two
> years ago, the gender system I never used, an affix system inspired by
> a conlang I ran across 6 years ago, the verb scheme from Rick
> Morneau's
> Lexical Semantics paper... and throw them in a big pot together, simmer
> on
> high for 6 weeks, voila, language, no more orphaned sketches!
>
My two last conlangs I've been working on are in fact old sketches I decided to
clean up too. :)

>
> Therein lies the rub.  I suspect that my problem is that I'm trying to
> verbify nouns in the lexicon, and nominalize verbs in the grammar, and
> tripping over myself coming and going.
>
> For example, one of the nouns I've made is "gift".  I figured I could
> make
> a verb out of it that, depending on which role the trigger is in,
> would
> mean "give", "receive", "be given" etc.
>
> However, upon further reflection, I can't justify to myself why the
> noun
> should be "gift" and not "giver", "recipient" or one of the other
> roles.
> Or "giving", in which case I'd seriously have to consider whether I'm
> inventing nouns at all or just verbs whose infinitives can be used as
> nouns.
> The trigger system invites me to consider all the arguments of the verb
> as
> equally valid, but I do plan to derive new nouns from the verb derived
> from
> the core noun, so I have to pick one to be the root and derive the
> others.
> Figuring out which one to use is the problem.
>
I have an idea which may seem not very much like a trigger system, but would
probably help you a little.

As you said, trigger systems, in a way, nominalize verbs. If we take, for
instance:

"the gives the apple to the child"

In a trigger language, with focus on the agent, we could translate the sentence
as:

"The man is the giver of the apple to the child" (1)

With focus on the recipient:

"The child is the recipient of the apple from the man" (2)

With focus on the gift:

"The apple is the gift of the man to the child" (3)

It's from these sentences that i got the idea. What you want is to have a core
noun, derive a verb from it, and thanks to the trigger system, derive new nouns
from the verb (corresponding to the different roles). My idea would be not to
pass by the verb stage. Why not having a root meaning "give" in the broad sense.
From this root, you could derive a bunch of nouns, with no one being the core.
For instance, give-actor would be "giver", give-actee would be "recipient",
give-patient would be "gift", give-action would be "giving", etc... (not very
good, but I think you can work on it to be nicer :) ). Then, each of these nouns
could be derived into a verb, with the particularity that each verb could take
only one role as focus. For instance, in the sentences above,the verb derived
from "giver" would be used only in the sentence (1) where the focus is the
giver, the verb derived from "gift" in the sentence (3) where the focus is the
gift. If this system was regular enough, it would even look like a normal
conjugation of a verb of a trigger system! And even if it didn't, doesn't it
look nice? :)

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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