Re: Syntaxy-Turvy (long, crazy)

Thank you for your response, Christophe!

I got the idea for this language from the book _The Origins of Complex
Language_ by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy.  He outlines several conlangs for
purposes of illustration during the book -- but this is not one of them, and
is rather weirder than any of the ones he proposes.

I have one concern which I need to wrestle with before I take the language
further (and which I need to resolve to answer some of your questions): word
order.

My original plan was to have the order be: Action-Noun-Passion, parallelling
the Agent-Verb-Patient structure of ordinary SVO languages like English.

Later I decided it might be more semantically elegant to reverse it to
Passion-Noun-Action.  My reasoning goes as follows:

Imagine the following (depressing) action chain:

The boss fires the man, the man yells at the wife, the wife scolds the child,
the child kicks the cat.

Notice the forward-flowing chain of causation.  You could do something just
like that in the ONS version of Taxy:

Bos fire.  Fire man yell.  Yell wife scold.  Scold child kick.  Kick cat.

It's exactly the same causation-chain, except that it's broken into
action-noun-action chunks, rather than noun-action-noun chunks.

For that reason, I thought that ONS was a more elegant order for Taxy than
SNO.

But that makes me wonder -- for consistency, ought I to reverse ALL word-order
choices in English?  (I do want Taxy to be a kind of inside-out English as far
as grammar goes.)

It seems to me that that would quickly become tiresome.  The novelty of Taxy
is not supposed to be in its reversed word order, but in its reversed
noun-verb syntax.

So the options are, as I see it:

1.  Reverse English constitutent order completely.
    benefits:  consistency, nice causal flow.
    drawbacks:  order reversal detracts from noun/verb reversal

2.  Keep English order except for ONS order.
    benefits: nice causal flow, not too much order reversal.
    drawbacks: inconsistent.

3.  Keep my original SNO order.
    drawbacks: reversed causal flow
    benefits: consistent with English syntax, highlights only noun/verb
reversal

and finally, one last option, which I just thought up while writing this
message:

4.  Re-define things so that the "subject" of a noun *is* its passion and
    the "object" of a noun *is* its action.

This would be satisfying from the point of view of causal flow; however, it
would mean that in an intransitive sentence specifies an passion and its
patient, not an action and its agent, which doesn't seem that communicatively
useful.

Bother.

Of the above, I'm currently leaning towards 3 or possibly 4, but I'd like your
input as to which of the possibilities would be most interesting.

To address some of your questions:
>
>How do you handle adjectives? Are you gonna make them verbs, nouns, or a
>completely different category? Are you gonna make adverbs, and derive
>adjectives from them? (it would keep the symmetry between "usual" languages
>and Taxy :) )
I would require adverbs and adverbial phrases to be adjacent to the verb they
modify, but permit adjectives and adjectival phrases to be moved fairly freely
about the sentence -- the reverse of the situation in English.

>How do you handle three participants' sentences, like "I give the dog a
bone"?

Ah, yes, I think those are called (at least by some people) "ditransitives."

Perhaps I could replace them with a sentence with three verbs: Action,
Passion, and Intention.  (X happened to me, and I did Y in order that Z might
happen)

Intention seems like the logical counterpart to Recipient or Beneficiary in a
normal ditransitive.

Actually, this is a *very* good argument for choosing option 4 above.

If Subjects are Actions, there's no particular reason that Intentions should
show up in ditransitives.  There's no reason one should have to have an
Action, a Passion, and then an Intention.

However, if Subjects are Passions, then they are obligatory.  You need a
transitive to describe an Action, and if you want an intention to show up, you
need to add yet a third participant.

That's brilliant!  By asking that question, you've shown me how to solve my
dilemma above!  I will rewrite Taxy so that it has SNO order, Subjects are
Passions, Direct Objects are Actions, and Indirect Objects are Intentions!

Thank you!

>And prepositional phrases? :))
Normal, but the objects are verbs instead of nouns of course!  There will have
to be some counterpart to gerunds and infinitives which allows a noun to be
treated as a verb and placed in a prepositional phrase though.

Thank you very much, Christophe!  I thought you might enjoy this language.
You seem to have a penchant for radical language designs.

Ed

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