Re: Another new project and trigger languages

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Christopher Wright <faceloran@...>:
>
>
>>But I'm not sure that I understand triggers. Could someone help me
>>with
>>an idiot's explanation? I'll provide the idiot if you provide the
>>explanation :))
>
>
> Trigger systems are easily explained as *focus* systems. In a trigger system, a
> noun phrase is always chosen to have the focus (corresponding to a "as for" in
> English). But it is marked only for that, i.e. for having the focus. Its
> grammatical function in the sentence is not marked on that noun phrase, but on
> the verb instead. Other noun phrases are marked for their function normally. In
> a way, the explanation once given by Kristian Jensen is a good one: you must
> think of a sentence in a trigger language to have an understated "is", and the
> verb is actually a nominal form, like an agent, patient, etc... form. So in a
> trigger language a sentence like "John loves Mary" can be rendered as:
> - John-trigger love-agent Mary-patient, or "John (is) the lover of Mary"
> (or "as for John, he is the lover of Mary"),
> - Mary-trigger love-patient John-agent, or "Mary (is) the loved one by John",
> depending on who you want to focus on.
> The peculiarity of this system compared to passive voices and such is that it's
> completely symmetric, *any* function can become the trigger if there is a
> verbal form for it.
For one of my languages, I'm using a generalization of this. Nouns are
marked with affixes that roughly correspond to their "rank" of
importance in the sentence (one of them is most important, although
beyond that they're pretty much interchangeable), which I'm calling
"ordinals". The verb is marked with the ordinals of its arguments,
inflected to show role (agent, patient, recipient, etc.). Since
adjectives are stative verbs, the possessive form of a noun actually
derives a stative verb, and adverbs are replaced with a "manner"
case-role, word order is incredibly free. Is this a workable system?

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