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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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Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>