Re: a grammar sketch...

In addition to what Marcus proposed.

A system with two cases: 'absolutive' and 'participational' (?).

Surface:
child-ABS laugh
Underlying:
Situation: laughter; predicated to: child.

Everything's as usual.

Surface:
stone-PART fall
Underlying:
Situation: falling; participated in by: stone.

'Stone' is inanimate, so it must be marked as only 'participating' in
the situation, even when no other participants are named.

Surface:
child-PART stone-ABS fall
Underlying:
Situation: stone-throwing; participated in by: child.

Situation with more than one participants; the most 'prominent' of them
stands in PART, the rest (in ABS) form kinda incorporative construction
with the verb.

Note: _Child-PART laugh_ is possible too, implying that there are other,
unnamed participants ('together with somebody' or 'at somebody').

Also possible: _Stone-PART throw_ 'The stone is being thrown';
_Child-PART throw_ 'The child throws (something, perhaps together with
somebody)'.

Indeed, ABS gets in fact split into several 'underlying' cases=roles,
but this is probably inevitable with so bizarre a system. Noun classes
are actually 'active'.


Basilius
-  -  -  -  -  -  -

On Thu, 5 Oct 2000 23:52:57 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier
<joerg.rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>> > child-I stone-II throw
>> >
>> > child-II laugh
>> >
>> > stone-I fall
<...>
>Of course it doesn't make any semantic sense.  And it is probably also
>very difficult to find a syntactic explanation.  And that's why I
>proposed
>it!  It is so absurd that it's fun to do.  Of course, such a language
>would have to allow both animates and inanimates to take both case I
>and II, while in an active language, you can reserve the agentive case
>for animates, as I have done in Nur-ellen.
>
>If one was to show me a language which does this and asked me on my
>opinion whether it's natural or not, I'd say, "Definitely constructed!"
>because the only way I can imagine how it could happen is that some
>conlanger was doing it for the fun of it.
>
>> If you can find a way to explain why you treat the 'subject' of stative/
>> non-controlled/non-volitional/whatever predicates like transitive
agents,
>> then it would be really cool.
>
>Yes, because it looks so completely absurd!
>
>>       Perhaps it's possible to find a way to
>> make it fit semantics too.
>
>Marcus, your turn.
>
>Jörg.