Re: What would you call this?

Peter wrote:

<<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.>>

This reminds me of an inverse system--almost exactly.   Those, however, have
to do with animacy.   You could encode a distinction whereby the subject is
regarded as higher in the animacy chain than an object.   So, if you had:

boy = kana
man = tepa
see = mata

Then you could have:

kana tepa mata (or mata kana tepa or kana mata tepa) all meaning "The boy
sees the man".

And that would be fine: The nominal order is SO, and the verb can go wherever
(though it might be strange under this system to insert the verb in between
the nominal ordering unit, making SVO more marked than VSO or SOV).

For the other word orders, you get:
-le = inverse

Then you could have:

tepa kana mata-le, tepa mata-le kana, mata-le tepa kana, still meaning "The
boy sees the man".

And that would do it.

This fits in ver well with the type of syntax I was trying to create to
describe my VSO language, Kamakawi.   I gave the noun in the nominative a different
name (I'm still trying to think of a good one.   "Dominant Noun" sounds bad,
and it'd get tagged "D", which is just like "determiner"), and the object noun
was always preceded by a type of object marker (which I called O), so that
everything that followed the object marker became a part of the OP, which was
dominated by the DN', the *specifier* of which was the VP, so that sentences are
called DP's (dominance phrases.   I also thought of calling the nominative
noun a "relational noun", so that the whole thing would be a "relational
phrase"--that is, a description of how one noun relates to another [in which case
making the VP the spec. of the RP makes some sense]).

So, that's my thought.

-David