Re: Indicating verbs valence? (Was: The disappeared conlang)

> From: Stephen Mulraney
>
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2002 18:50:41 -0500
> Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...> wrote:
>
> > ObConLang: After not being able to parse the Tyl-Sjok text in the last
> > relay, I realized that 'Yemls had some ambiguities.
> > I wonder if there are any standard ways of dealing with
> > 1. when a verb may have 1 or 2 objects, how to tell if there
> are 2 object
> > phrases or just one
>
> Perhaps you could have a 'valence' inflection (or particle, or whatever)
> on the verb which specifies how many and what kind of 'arguments'
> the verb takes. I learnt a lot about this kind of thing from David Bell's
> grammar of ámman îar (thanks David!). You can see the kind of valencies
> that his language inflects for at section 7.3 on
> http://www.graywizard.net/Conlinguistics/amman_iar/ai_predicate_mo
> rphology.htm
> You might need to read the section at
> http://www.graywizard.net/Conlinguistics/preliminaries.htm
> too, in order to understand the dialect of English used in this grammar ;)
You're quite welcome.  Indeed I am somewhat surprised that people still read
my web pages as I and amman iar are somewhat, shall we say.. old wave!  So
much new seems to be happening in our once little, now rather large,
community that I find it hard to keep up these days.  Oh my, I suppose that
means that I will have to bring my site up-to-date.  What a chore that could
prove to be.

As for valence inflections, they are a favorite feature of amman iar and in
fact the set of predicate inflections together might be considered a
defining characteristic of the language.

I don't work much on amman iar these days (although it still manages to
evolve somehow).  I spend most of my conlanging hours on my latest (read
second) language, nathya.  It is rapidly approaching a state of stability
(if such a state really exists for conlangs) that might warrant a debut here
real soon now.  It is becoming in many ways a very different sort of
language than amman iar although its lexicon was derived from that of amman
iar.  Oh, it's still basically SOV and morphologically ergative, but the
split ergativity of amman iar is gone and it probably won't be syntactically
ergative as is amman iar.  And my much beloved predicate inflections are
gone as they must be if the language was to distinguish itself at all from
its predecessor.  But more when I'm ready.

"understand the dialect of English used in this grammar"? Hmmm, could it be
that my maladroit elucidations might not have been posed in as luculent a
presentation as might be required?  I'll have to work on that. ;-)

Stay curious,
David

David E. Bell
The Gray Wizard
dbell@graywizard.net
www.graywizard.net
AIM: GraWzrd

Wisdom begins in wonder.

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