Re: Verbal nouns

* H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> [001003 05:56]:
> I'm working on making up a set of morphemes that can convert any (well,
> almost any) verb/noun/relative to any other. You can verbalize a noun, or
> nominalize a verb, or even verbalize a nominalized verb! Of course, each
> morpheme will carry a slight nuance; so verbalizing a nominalized verb
> will actually mean something more than the original verb itself. For
> example, in English: "to play" nominalizes to "player" which verbalizes to
> "to playerize" (i.e., to make into a person who plays). Bad example off
> the top of my head, but you get the idea -- "to playerize" has acquired
> more meaning than the original verb "to play".
I've been working on this myself. All verbs have a noun-meaning, which I
guess in English would be the gerund: <vaì> v. to run, fly; n. running,
flying. <ä=> derives a noun from the verb's default object: <rî> vt.
give; <ärî> n. gift. The equivalent of -er in english is <=enn>, <rîenn>
n. giver. Come to think of it, this is really a noun of the verb's
default subject. The other way, noun -> verb, isn't as detailed yet as
I don't know the verbs as well as I know the nouns.

The third open word class is the statives, basically adjectives and
non-sentential adverbs. When a stative follows a noun and does not
agree with it, it is predicative: <bren kiar> "the car is.red/reds" vs.
<kiar bren> "the red car" (whoa, order matters!). This is potentially
ambiguos; <gav fear xve> means both "the white dog leaves" and "the dog
(being white, which is white) leaves" and, seeing it as a serial verb
construction: "the dog is.red leeaves" which in good English would be
something like "the dog is white and it leaves". When a stative takes
verb afixes it is a verb, when it agrees with a noun (by taking noun
afixes, all except number) it acts as an adjective, when there is no
other noun (and it takes noun afixes, including number) it is a noun.

Relative clauses uses this too; it's not really a clause but a stative
made of what else would have been a relative clause, through
incorporation on the verb [syntax?]. Subordinate clauses, well they
depend on a subtype of verbs, the badly named experiencer-verbs :)
Complement-verb? Conjunct-verb? Subjunct-verb? Hmm...


t.