Re: Syntaxy-Turvy (long, crazy)

At 11:43 28/06/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Thank you for your response, Christophe!
>
You're welcome!

>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 can imagine. Even I never had such an idea! :)

>
>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 solve your problem with intransitive sentences, you could just have two
kinds of intransitive sentences:
- a SN kind, which would be passion-patient (nice to translate French "on")
- a NO kind, which would be agent-action (I know it's strange to consider
intransitive a sentence without subject but with an object, but as here
it's the subject and the object that are verbs, transitivity becomes quite
different. To solve the problem you can just use a SNO transitive sentence
with a "dummy" subject - like a kind of 'do', an equivalent of French "on",
but for verbs -)

>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.
>
:)) I like it, it's quite funny :) .

>>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."
>
Yeah, that's it!

>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.
>
Nice idea :) . Would you make a difference between nouns that have a
possible Intention, and nouns that have not? After all, not all verbs in
English can take an indirect object.

>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!
>
You're welcome <blush> :) , but I did nothing really.

>>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.
>
So you would also reverse the function of prepositions and conjunctions!
English prepositions (at, to, in, from, since, in spite of, etc...) would
be rendered as conjunctions in Taxy, while English conjunctions (because,
while, when, where, so that, etc...) would become prepositions! Wow!

>Thank you very much, Christophe!  I thought you might enjoy this language.
>You seem to have a penchant for radical language designs.
>
How could you guess?! :))) Indeed I like strangest features :) . In fact,
I'm even a little jealous that you had this idea before me :))) . But I
really like it, the consequences of reversing the grammar like that are
infinite!

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)