Re: Non-static verbs?

Oops... my reply got messed up again. Hopefully this message will get it
to the list correctly.

On Thu, Aug 17, 2000 at 04:16:25AM +0200, taliesin the storyteller wrote:
> * H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> [000817 03:12]:
[snip]
> > Tho my conlang takes somewhat a different view: you have objects, and
> > events, and interrelationships between them. These correspond with
> > nouns, verbs, and "relatives", respectively. [..] Relatives are used
> > mainly for identifying subclauses and adjoining sentences.
>
> Hmm... AFMCL, objects have states, can go from one state to another, start
> being or stop being...
Exactly. Verbs in my conlang describe the changes of state that an object
undergoes.

As for coming in/out of existence, I haven't really thought about that yet...
although I'd probably use an idiom I mentioned before, involving the nullar
number of the word for "universe": an object coming into existence would be
one going from "myy'Pr0m" (nullar originative of "universe", meaning
"no-universe" or "non-existence) to "Peru'm" (singular receptive of
"universe"); and an object ceasing to exist would be described as going from
"Per0'm" (singular originative) to "myy'Prum" (nullar receptive).

> what you call relatives are mostly also verbs in
> my lang. Verbs like âr "to think" and 'syarad' "to decide" require
> another sentence, or a phrase marked for benefactive, to be complete.
[snip]

Hmm, I don't think I made it quite clear what "relatives" are. (The term
"relatives" isn't particularly descriptive either.)

Basically, relatives are a somewhat broad category which includes the
equivalent of prepositions and particles. I haven't worked out many of
the details of the relatives system yet, but here's what I have so far:

1) back-referencing relatives: basically a limited form of demonstratives
  that refer to something from the previous phrase, in adjoined
  sentences. Adjoined sentences are similar to what some conlangs do
  in stringing together a causal chain of actions: e.g., "The man
  instigated her to hit his enemy who then stole the man's treasure"
  becomes
        The.man instigated her* hit his.enemy* stole the.man's@ treasure
  where the words marked by * are "linking words", doubly-inflected to
  reflect their respective function in each of the phrases they join.
  The word marked @ is a back-referencing relative, marked for
  gender/number/case to match "the.man" in the first phrase, in addition
  to its own inflections to indicate its function in its own phrase.
  (In this case, a back-referencing relative is not necessary, since
  the pronoun "his" would be sufficient, but this is just to give a
  simple example of how back-referencing works.)

2) sub-ordinating relatives: basically used to construct sub-clauses.
  For example:
        The man who was beaten reported to the guards
  will be rendered something like:
        subord(1) beaten(verb) the.man(2,1) report(verb) the.guards(2)
  The subordinating relative "subord" identifies what follows as a
  sub-clause. The main inflection of "the.man" (2) reflects its
  function in the subclause begun by the relative, its auxilliary
  inflection (1), which matches the inflection of the relative,
  reflects its function in the main sentence.
  Basically, the subordinating relative is used like this:
        subord(A) ...<subclause>... ending-word(A) ...<main sentence>
  The ending word can be a noun (for noun-clauses) or a verb
  (for participial phrases).

3) Summative (summaritive/summarizing?) relatives: I haven't worked
  out the details of this yet, but basically, these relatives occur
  in concluding sentences of a section/passage, and, through various
  markings, back-references key topics/ideas in preceding prose and
  re-emphasizes the interconnections described between them.

Relatives are the least worked-out area in my conlang thus far, so
a lot of the details presented here may change; however, the key
concept behind relatives is that they are a referencing mechanism
showing how various phrases or sentences or even entire passages
relate to each other.


T