Re: Subject: Nounless?

Basilius wrote:

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Just two of a few possibilities:

consider-X using-Y (and) giving(-it)-to-Z
consider-X giving(-something)-to-Z (which-)affects-Y

(simply to confine to verb tags already mentioned; some
'taking' would
sound more natural than 'using')

In fact, it depends on the available inventory of
second-level verbal
forms; in particular, I thought of kinda voices:
to-use-X/to-be-used-by-X,
etc.
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yep. so the complement of the first one would be accusative
while the complement to the second one would be agent.
that makes already two cases! how will you dissolve them?
(just kidding! ;-)

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Yes, I do. The fun is in presenting *all* roles in this way.
And verbs
can do a lot of things that usual cases cannot (moods, voice
transformations, etc.).
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i like that too. my favourite natlangs do that a lot.

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>Having either a dozen preposed verbs or a dozen suffixed
>cases is only a question of dating a Khmer or a Finn. And
>then you'll face the daunting problem of matching "case
>roles" with aspects like in the pair "get/have",
>"be/become", etc.
I don't see much trouble here; semantically these differ in
some component like 'begin to...' or 'act so as to...',
which
may be a separate word or an aspectual affix:

...acting so-as-to-have-X
...beginning(-something) so-as-to-be-X

Again, it's a matter of having enough non-finite
forms/moods.
Note that not all forms need to support such distinctions
(e. g. 'so as to have...' = 'so as to get...').
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yeah. it's just that i tried that once and i ended up with
so many verbs that i coudn't remember nor use anything.

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>There is also the problem of the actual
>subject of the "participle". Is it the main subject, the
>main verb, the object, the sentence itself?
This seems to be an inventory issue, too. One can use a form
like Russian compredicative (referring to subject of the
upper-level verb), an analog of English -ing-form (mostly
referring to the immediately preceding noun), some third
form referring to the preceding sentence, etc. It would be
interesting, however, to figure out the minimal sufficient
inventory.

The forms needn't to be too cumbersome: for example, CV=verb
tag
+ C=form marker (that is, just one syllable added to
semantically
nominal stem).
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yes, that's really handy. most of my conlangs have these
prostuff. I wonder why so few natlangs have them.

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>Regarding the
>chaining of sentences, many langs do that too. But they
>usually order sentences according to chronological
>experience rather than according to cause-effect: "me use
ax
>(I) cut tree (it) falls reach ground" for "I cut down the
>tree with an ax".
Such langs usually have poor morphology; if one has forms
like 'in order to do-X', '(thus) having done-X', 'by means
of
doing-X', word order can be freer.
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you're very right. such langs have "poor" morphology that
makes them easy to learn and hell to express complicated
contexts.

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>So rather than "nounless" I'd say it's replacing cases onto
>nouns by verbs.
Yes, *underlying* (semantic) nouns remain, as I said. But
it's
interesting to see if they can be *totally* eliminated on
the
surface.
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i like this kind of lang. all of my conlangs tend to work
that way: no case suffixes and all prepositions save the
"core" ones are verbs. btw, how many of us make this kind of
conlangs? i mean : conlangs with no case suffixes and few
adpositions?
and also how many make conlangs with a consistent head-tail
word order even in compound words?

Mathias