Re: Help: Zhyler ECM/Raising Verbs (Longish)
From: | Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> |
Date: | Monday, April 5, 2004, 13:13 |
Quoting David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...>:
> Andreas wrote:
>
> <<I'm a bit daunted by a class _XIV_ nominal suffix. How many are there, and
> what differentiates them?>>
>
> Really? You don't know about the 32 official nominal suffixes of the world's
> languages specified under Universal Grammar? I'd think it'd be in any
> elementary text book... At any rate, an example of a class XIV would be
> /-ness/ in English.
I know you're joking, but I'd just point out it's not safe to assume that I
know something just because it's found in any elementary textbook. I've taken
precisely zero linguistics courses, and while I've perused a number of
textbooks, I've not studied any particularly deeply.
> << Seoant rachoaraso bhadoro "I-want thy-eating-ACC the-bread-ACC-ADJ-ACC"
>
> Anyone thinking this is a good idea?>>
>
> I'm not sure I follow exactly... But let me say that you could have two
> different strategies: One for nominal objects, and one for pronominal
> objects. You could also turn "bread" into an adverb. Have you got an
> oblique case? You could make the objects of nominalizations oblique.
The idea is that you need treat the sentence _rachoar bhado_ "thou atest the
bread" ad the object of "I want". To achieve this, we need to nominalize it.
The verb simply becomes a verbal noun and the subject pronoun becomes a
possesive pronoun, but what of the object? The idea here is that we turn it
into a kind of adjective - "bread-ish" or something of the sort. This adj is
derived from the accusative of the noun, which essentially makes sense because
it's semantically still an object. Hence _rachoaras bhador_ "your bread-ish
eating". Now, this is sposta be the object of "I want", so we need put an
accusative ending on the noun, but since Meghean adjs agree in nom/acc you get
one on _bhador_ too. Hence _seoant rachoaraso bhadoro_ (again, _oant_ is just
English "want" thrown in as a stop-gap).
(This would also suggest the existence of a series of depronominal adjectives -
*ser, *rar, *ter, *mer, *ear, *char. Perhaps some of the forms would differ;
I'd need some more diachronical thinking here.)
> You could have a different type of nominalizer for just this instance (like
> /pag-/ in Cebuano). Lots of languages have different nominalizers for
> different things.
I could, but it doesn't really address the problem, namely how to treat the
object of a nominalized verb.
Andreas
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