Re: a grammar sketch...

daniel andreasson wrote:
>
> David wrote:
>
> > > I wonder what will be our next darling.
>
> Christophe replied:
>
> > I think I've spanned the whole range of possibilities. What can
> > you think of next? :)
>
> I've got two words for ya: pivotless languages! Langs with no
> sentence alignment or grammatical relations whatsoever. There
> is just no way of telling if in the sentence 'Dog bites man'
> it is the man or the dog that is bitten.
So how does such a language *work* then?  Granted, what is subject and
what is object can often be reconstructed from the context, but there
are always cases of doubt, and the matter is utterly clumsy anyway.

Another idea: an "anti-active" language.  Active intransitive verbs
(such as "to laugh") treat their subjects like direct objects,
while non-active verbs (e.g. "to fall") like transitive subjects:

child-I stone-II throw

child-II laugh

stone-I fall

(I and II are some kinds of cases, for which I haven't invented names
yet;
or use head marking instead.)

Jörg.