Re: a grammar sketch...

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:


> > > 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.)
> >
> > Hmm. I and II are fine names I think. As for the anti-active language,
> > it doesn't really make any sense semantically, which is the way I
> > define active languages. You might come up with a syntactic explanation,
> > but you're gonna have to ask Marcus about that. ;)
Doesn't make any syntactic sense at all.  But I could *force* it to work.

>Of course it doesn't make any semantic sense.  And it is probably also
>very difficult to find a syntactic explanation.
Nope.  I thought of two very quickly.

>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.
I agree 100%

> >       Perhaps it's possible to find a way to
> > make it fit semantics too.
>
>Marcus, your turn.
Here's my syntactic "explanation".

-- stone-I fall

"Stone" is in the nominative case.

-- child-II laugh

"child" is in the "instrumental" case.

-- child-I stone-II throw

"child" is in the nominative case and "stone" is in the instrumental case.

All verbs are actually intransitive.  The "II" marking is sort of like the
"by" phrase in an English passive -- I chose to call it "instrumental"
because some languages use the "instrumental" as some kind of catch-all to
use when nothing else is entirely appropriate.  I think Turkish is one of them.

In "stone-1 fall" the subject is marked as nominative.  Nothing wierd.

In "child-I stone-II throw", the subject is marked as nominative, and
"stone" gets put into this "catch-all instrumental".  It would basically
mean something like "The child throws by use of the stone."  For

The odd one is "child-II laugh".  When you get an agentive verb it is
forced to passivize.  Basically, this means that the agent must be kicked
into an oblique case (the instrumental) and there is no true subject.  This
is called the impersonal passive, and there are languages that do it.  (But
not so selectively.)

This kind of explanation would make a couple predictions.  Like you would
have to be able to drop a subject of a volitional verb and the object of a
transitive.  If you had verbal agreement, than the volitional intransitives
would have to either be a bare stem in these cases, have an impersonal
agreement, or a third person agreement.  If there was also gender in the
agreement, then the agreement of these verbs would have to be the default
gender.

That's from a theoretical point of view at least. :-)  There are a couple
other interpretations as well.

If you made the I and II marking on the verb instead of the noun... well,
I'd have to think about that one a bit. :-)

===============================
Marcus Smith
AIM:  Anaakoot
"When you lose a language, it's like
dropping a bomb on a museum."
   -- Kenneth Hale
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