Re: S7 grammar in a nutshell (long)

From:    Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
> And Rosta <a.rosta@...> writes:
> > What is the max number of arguments a predicate can have?
>
> Two: agent and patient.
You mean you have no ditransitive verbs in your language at all?
That seems rather rare in my experience.  There are plenty of languages
that seek to *create* more ditransitives (applicatives, e.g.).

> > Clitics. I'm not sure what functional virtue these have.
>
> It's probably a misnomer.  I wanted a distinction between affixes,
> which are non directly derived from stems, but a distinct, closed
> lexical class, and stripped stems -- stems without their class prefix.
> I called the latter 'clitics', because there cannot be used in
> isolation, but since that is not the only criterion for clitics, the
> name is probably misleading.
>
> Do you have a good name for it?  'Stripped stem that cannot be used in
> isolation' in one word.
What you're describing sounds something like the distinction between
"stem" and "root" in certain areal studies.

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