Re: What would you call this?

At 06:15 16/06/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Quoting Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...>:
>
> > I have an idea for a language that achieves free word order by inflecting
> > the verb according to whether the subject or object occurs first. In the
> > default form, the following word orders are possible
> > VSO
> > SVO
> > SOV
>
>Usually, there will be only *one* default order, if there is
>any evidence for a basic order at all.  (Some languages have
>no such basic order.)
I meant a default form of the verb, not a default order. Any noun with a
role other than subject or object must be marked. The default form of the
verb indicates that the subject precedes the object, therefore those orders
are possible.

> > In the marked form, these are possible
> >
> > VOS
> > OVS
> > OSV
> >
> > If the verb is marked, and only one unmarked noun is present, the verb
> > becomes passive.
> >
> > What would the terminology be for such an inflection?
>
>It sounds like what you have is a system that is sensitive to
>discourse functions like topic and focus. The study of such
>languages is always "fuzzy", since topic means little more than
>"what the utterance is about", while the focus refers to new
>information in the sentence.  Examples:
>
>   topicalized argument:  "_John_, I know."
>   focused argument: "_Who_ did Mary see last night?"
>
>Many, many languages treat these discourse function differently
>from one another in the syntax.  In your case, that would boil
>down to verb agreement with what is presumably the topic (you
>don't actually say here).
It's not really a case of verb agreement- 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. I did consider this method, but it was possible for
subject and object to have the same gender, number and definiteness, so I
decided on simply order-marking the verbs.

Pete

*The parent language had four numbers, which reduced to three. Different
words reduced in different ways, giving rise to the genders. For example,
nouns where the singular merged with the dual, taking the form of the dual
belong to the corporeal gender- so called because most anatomical terms
belong to it.

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