Re: What would you call this?

Staving Thomas Wier:

>  this is a language where nouns
> > inflect for four levels of definiteness and a gender-dependent number
> > system*.  However, these aren't involved in the marking of the verb to
> > determine word order.
>
>Wait -- I'm confused.  How does changing the inflection on the verb
>free up the word order when you say the word order of the two actants
>is fixed, as either OS or SO?  It really does sound like what you're
>describing is a discourse function of the language. It sounds like
>when objects are fronted before subjects, i.e. in some sense topicalized,
>the verb must agree with that special change in syntax by a special
>affix/change.
The only language I that makes significant use of free word order is Latin
(default SOV, but often free). Latin, of course, is an inflecting language
and its cases play a large role in freeing the word order. I wanted to do
things differently, and devise a system for free word order without cases.

The main thing I had to achieve to allow word order to be free was to
identify the verb, subject and object. The verb can be easily distinguished
from the nouns morphologically, we now just need to determine which noun is
which. Since I wasn't using case, I decided to mark the order of the nouns
on the verb. This distinguishes between SO (default) and OS (marked)
orders. Once this is established, the verb can go wherever the speaker
likes - before, between or after the nouns. An intransitive sentence would
normally be in the default form, and SV and VS orders are possible.
However, if an intransitive sentence is marked, it is effectively passive.

Pete

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