Re: 'Yemls Morphology

On Sun, 8 Jul 2001 23:11:19 -0500, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>From: "Jeff Jones" <jeffsjones@...>
>
>| Here's most of what I have so far on 'Yemls morphology. I know it's not
>| very clear and I'd like to get some comments.
>
>Hey I'm impressed!  And there are some similarities to my conlang.
:-)  I'll be looking closely at what you say.
BTW, I'm probably going to respond to the parts of this at a time, as I
think of it.

[snipped for later]

>| The grammatical voice of a word indicates whether its subject functions
>| as an agent (active voice), a patient (passive voice), or a complement
>| (complementive voice). The grammatical voice is active for action words
>| and passive for state words when unmarked; this can be changed using
>| prefixes.
>
> Do you know how you're going to mark the agents, patients and other
> elements of the sentence?  Case marking?
Afraid not, though case marking would have been easier.
I'm using SVO, with the case roles determined by the grammatical voice.
Normally, and when all core arguments are present, this is:

Subject    Head          1st Object 2nd Object
---------- ------------- ---------- ----------
Agent      active        Patient    Complement
Patient    passive       Complement Agent
Complement complementive Patient    Agent

The 1st object must be present if the 2nd object is. However, for many (if
not most) words, 1 or 2 case roles are undefined. The normal order is
designed to handle this optimally. For less common situations, I'll have to
have some mechanism for rearranging the objects.

Oblique arguments are adverbs or use prepositions and usually follow the
objects, but might come anywhere after the head.

>Anyway, keep it up; you've obviously worked on this a good bit...
A lot more work to go. I just hope the relay translation needs only the
parts I've already done!

Jeff

>~DaW~