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

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 19:56:48 +0000, Stephen Mulraney
<ataltanie@...> wrote:

>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_morphology.
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 ;)
Thanks, Stephen.

I already have verb prefixes to indicate which argument position maps to
which core case role. I call this grammatical voice, although it only
shuffles arguments without deleting any. Currently, the 2nd object can be
omitted with no other indication. For a different language this would be a
good solution.

Incidentally, I had looked at David's site quite a while back and not seen
this section. It looks very useful. Unfortunately, the text lines are too
wide for my computer, so I have to scroll back and forth for each line.

>Another idea, and one which I think is going into my as-yet-unnamed
>lang (call it ML, mature-lang, for the nonce, to distinguish it from
>its ancestor P(rimitive)L), is that the verb stem is modified for each
>'valence'. For example, the stem for 'to cut', intransitive (whatever
>use that might be) is 'caer', while the usual transitive stem is, I
>think, 'coirin', the stem diphthong having undergone a systematic change
>from one grade of vowel to another (a flavour of i-mutation, in fact)
>
>If this sounds like the method of semitic languages, you're rightish.
>PL had a triconsonental root for each word, with different vowel values
>and affixes to form different kinds of words, including different valences
>of verbs. E.g. the root S`-g-(r) [(r)=voiceless 'r', S`=retroflex s] is for
>"cut" and we get "caer" < S`Ego(r), while "coirin" < S`egu(r)eX\i.
>In ML the 3-root system is no longer productive, and the ML forms are the
>reflexes (descendants) of these two PL forms... in theory. All I need now
>is some convincing sound-laws connecting them... In principle, you should
>not need to know PL grammar to know ML grammar, since by analogy there
>should be only a few conjugations of verbs, and a few simple rules for
>changing intransitive->transitive etc.
Coming up with sound-laws is especially tricky when _both_ endpoints have
already been determined.

>Oh, I meandered... how unusual ;)
>
>> 2. when both the main verb and the verb in an object clause allow a
>> variable # of objects, how to tell which verb an object belongs to
>
>Once again, I don't know whether you language favours particles,
>inflexions, agglutinations, word order ... to signal things, but some
>ideas might be
>- qualify both vb & its args by one of a series of semantically empty
>      particles; using a different particle for each verb. Or don't put the
>      particles on the verb, and have them mean "what follow is/are the
>      object(s) of the 1st verb", "... the 2nd verb ...", etc
>- word order rules: maybe objects should occur in the same order that their
>  verbs appeared (or reverse order? ;)
>- gender & number agreement
>
>A better idea would be to use some kind of gender/number agreement and only
>use some uglier method when that is ambiguous?
I wanted to first review the possibilities, before seeing how they might
apply. But most solutions won't work without a complete redesign).

BTW, I finally uploaded my 'Yemls pages (at

http://home.earthlink.net/~jeffsjones/conlang/Yemls/YTOC.htm

I think), but what I have is mainly poorly organized notes.

Jeff

>
>Stephen

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