Re: Trigger Systems (was Re: Book on constructive linguistics)

Roger wrote:
<<
I often suspect it's simply a terminological dispute-- Passives, Focus,
Trigger-- sama-sama. Use of the "trigger" term in AN/Philippine
linguistics
is of rather recent origin, I think, and not widely used.
 >>

I think the problem is how it affects conlang construction.  A
language of the Philippine type (as its called in Sandra Chung's
old, old paper) can be derived so that you get what looks like
a trigger system.  If you go the other way, then it looks like
an absence of passive/applicative morphology and a plethora
of, essentially, case marking that goes on the verb.  Two conlangs
created from either end will end up looking very different--and
I actually have two that began at either end.

In one, every NP begins with a preposition.  This preposition can
precede the verb, leaving the subject unmarked, which is the trigger.
All other NP's (or PP's) can be dropped.  There are 20+ prepositions,
and they all work the same.

In the other language, I started out with an SOV language
with passive and applicative morphology and two different
genitival strategies.  From this I derived a VSO language, where
the subject is the topic/focus, and the appropriate verbal morphology
is used to ensure that the topic/focus is the subject, regardless of
its role.  As a result, the form of the verb changed, I derived
verbal agreement from pronouns, and obliques get marked in
a way that's similar to a fronted NP in English ("His eating of the
pie disturbed me").  Now, I can't claim that the latter is naturalistic,
but it's more natural than the first, and I'm much more pleased
with the result.

The main point for bringing it up was how the understanding
of a system, and how it's derived, affects the creation of a language.
I'm not saying that one or the other is better, but rather that it'd
be better to understand both, so as to be able to take advantage
of what each has to offer.  For example, if you go from the top-
down method, there's no reason that the subject has to be the
trigger.  It could be a really bizarre language where the direct
object is the trigger, so that in every sentence a direct object was
required (so all intransitive verbs would have to be causativized,
the subject being, perhaps, identical to the object--maybe a pronoun).
I suppose in such a language a subject and object would always
be required...  I don't know.  Anyway, that was the point in
bringing it up.

-David
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