Re: Trigger systems

Jason Scott <Pete544xx@...> wrote:


>Hello everyone!  I'm new to this list and just new to conlanging, at least in
>the serious sense.
Congratulations! And welcome to the list. We'd love to see
some of your linguistic offspring over here!

> For over a year I have created toy languages with a
>lexicon never reaching 200
Hey, what do you have against those? :) (Sticking to the
"offspring" metaphor, I'd be, linguistically speaking,
quite promiscuous.)

>My question for the group was: does anyone understand exactly how a trigger
>system works. I am considering to model my conlang after a this type of
>system. I've seen some explanations that were just an overview and overlooked
>the real function, and advantages it has over the conventional system.
Well, each system has "advantages". The trigger system is not special,
just rare among natural languages. While most natlangs mark the
noun phrases and other complements for case (showing sintactic or
semantic role) and set one of those as the focus (using word order
or whatever), trigger languages mark a constituent as focus and
place the role mark on the verb.

  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/how_wordclasses.html#Trigger

This is a link to one of my pages, with an explanation of trigger
systems based in Tagalog, with examples, by our own Kristian Jensen,
who must have answered this question about one hundred times now. ;)

(In fact, I think each new member, upon announcing themselves, should
receive a brochure describing various cool features, such as trigger
systems, ergativity, zero copula... anything else? :)

If you've read that already, I can try with some samples of one
of my poor children -- er, languages, which uses this system too.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  "... When all men on earth think, day and night, about the
   Zahir, which one will be a dream and which one a reality?"
                              Jorge Luis Borges, _The Zahir_