Trigger languages Re: Fur ther language development Q's

In a message dated 9/21/2004 16:42:53 Eastern Daylight Time,
ThatBlueCat@AOL.COM writes:

Rodlox wrote:

<<what is a trigger language?   are there language groups/families in
which
> > triggers are not  found?  what purpose do triggers serve?>>
There's no simple  way to explain this, because there's no simple
answer.  Triggers are  things found in languages like Tagalog, and
other languages like Tagalog,  and they don't work in a cut-and-dry
way.  (In fact, Matt Pearson  doesn't seem to think that there are
any triggers at all, if I understood  that paper correctly [which I
probably didn't].)  So, in order to  explain what people *mean* when
they say "trigger language", I'm going to  pretend that they're simple
to explain and work in one and only one  way.  This will give you an
idea for howt he real ones work, *but* it  will not approximate how
any one language *actually* works (except for a  visual conlang of
mine).

In English, the term "focus" doesn't play a  big role (or not as big as in,
say, Japanese), because it's not overtly  marked all the time.  So in the
sentence, "I went to the store", I  don't even know what the focus is
(is it the store?).  Anyway, though,  you can take a sentence and make
a focus with emphasis.  Here's an  example:

"Yesterday, my friend and I went to eat at  Quizno's."

Now, imagine someone asked the following  question:

"*Who* did you eat with?"

One might respond  with:

"Yesterday, my *friend* and I went to eat at  Quizno's."

With special emphasis on "friend".  Thus, "friend"  has
been focused.  It has special emphasis.  And, in fact,  I
can think of a way to focus every single word in  that
sentence.

The point is, focusing makes one part of the  sentence
the most important--what the listener should focus on.

In  trigger language, a morpheme (we'll call it a suffix)
marks what the most  important part of the sentence is
in every single sentence.  That  suffix is called the trigger.
So here's a made-up  example:

kane-ro-ta mane-lo tasa-ke felu-mi
/give-past-AGT.  man-TRIG. book-ACC. woman-DAT./
"The *man* gave the book to the  woman.

In theory (not in practice, as it turns out), you can  mix
these words up in any order you like, and you'll still get
the same  meaning.

Now, two things about this sentence.  First, /-lo/ is  the
trigger, and marks "man", so "man" is focused.  But if  it's
marked with the trigger, you don't know what the man's
doing.   That's why there's an "agent" suffix on the verb.
You look for the suffix  on the verb to know what the
word with the trigger suffix is doing in the  sentence.  So
here's that same sentence with a new  focus:

kane-ro-ke mane-ta tasa-lo felu-mi
/give-past-ACC. man-AGT.  book-TRIG. woman-DAT./
"The man gave *the book* to the woman.

And  you can imagine what the other permutation would
look like.

Another  (supposed) feature of trigger languages is that the
argument with the  trigger suffix is the *only* necessary
argument.  Here's an  example:

kane-ro-mi felu-lo
/give-past-DAT. woman-TRIG./
"The  woman was given (something by someone)."

So if you're already talking  about giving, and someone wants
to know who was the one that was given  something, the above
is all you'd need to say, whereas in English you'd  need to say
something like, "It was the woman that someone gave  something
to".

That, in a very small nutshell, is what a pristine  trigger language
might look like.  Again, no real trigger language  works exactly
like that.  A conlang trigger language just might work  like this,
though.

-David
Do you know of anyway I could get that put into a larger  nutshell?  a book
or a webpage or something?  You have only  whetted my thirst for knowledge and
my searches on the internet prove  futile.

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