Re: Argument Structures

Daniel Andreasson wrote:

>Why couldn't you have numbers as verbs? You can have "to be one
>in number" as a verb, and probably do just fine. Chickasaw does,
>IIRC, and they seem to manage.
Yes, indeed.  All numbers in Chickasaw are verbs.  Here is an example, just
for
the record

Hattak-at toklo
Man-NOM two
"There are two men" or "The men are two in number"

Chickasaw is an active language, and all number verbs take active agreement
(Class-I in the Chickasaw literature); contrary to what may be expected from
the semantics.

Chickasaw also uses these number verbs as a basis for possessive
constructions.  (This is one of my favorite features of the language).

Hattak yammat chokka-at in-toklo.
Man that(NOM) house-NOM DAT-two
"That man has two houses"

The interesting thing about this is that "house" is semantically the
subject of
the sentence (because the verb is "be two" which clearly is the predicate of
"house") but "that man" is syntactically the subject.  Both are marked with
nominative case, but "that man" also gives object agreement on the verb.

 I think having numbers as verbs
>is a really cool feature to have in a language.
It is quite a common feature in Native American languages.

Marcus