Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Need Advice on Syntax & Case System

From:JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
Date:Friday, April 26, 2002, 23:49
Christian Thalmann sikyal:

> Question: > > - Do you find the description of the cases and their uses > comprehensible and/or intuitive?
Uh, no. You spend a while describing the various syntactic variants of cases, but I couldn't find any explanation of what the difference between Predicative and Objective was. Most of your examples are what would be Indirect Object and Direct Object in English, or Accusative/Dative in Greek or Latin. Was that your intent?
> - Can you think of situations where this case system would fail or > produce problems?
Not really, although I don't really understand what semantic motivations you're using to distinguish the two object cases. I do like the examples where you use the different cases to show general v. specific action, but I wonder if those might cause problems in other situations. Other comments-- You wrote: "If for some reason we want to highlight an explicit subject, we can mention it first as an independent verbless statement (which I call a topic declaration), and then follow up with an implicit verb V P O / V O P structure: Torav, lonna u lawne i fele. Man:d sing:3i PRE song:i OBJ woman:d Lit.: "The man. Sings-he a song to the woman." The man, he sings a song to the woman. Note that in this case, |torav| is the topic declaration, which should be considered as a statement of its own, and not part of the sentence |Lonna u lawne i fele.|" This is a very natural feature, but your description of it is very odd. Why should we consider "torav" to be part of a different sentence? It's much simply and linguistically more accurate to say that there is a pre-verbal focus, and that any element receiving particular emphasis can be moved to that position. Such is a very common thing, cross-linguistically. Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu "If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." --G.K. Chesterton