Re: Argument Structures

On Wed, 23 Aug 2000, jonathan.jones wrote:

> Apart from the standard "transitive", "intransitive", and
> "ditransitive" verbs found in English, and the "reflexive" verbs in
> Romance languages, I'm not really familiar with many ways to introduce
> various argument structures into languages. So when working on the
> verbs in my (as yet unnamed) conlang, I tried to start from scratch
> and managed to list the following:
>
> "transitive": 1 agent, 1 patient              [I taught him]
> "transitive, focused": 1 agent, 1 patient, 1 focus    [I taught him
> Linguistics]
> "reflexive" : 1 agent/patient [I taught myself]
> "reflexive, focused" 1 agent/patient, 1 focus  [I taught myself
> Linguistics]
> "reciprocal": 2 agent/patient     sort of:[I taught him and he taught
> me]
> "reciprocal, focused" 2 agent/patient, 1 focus [ we taught each other
> linguistics]
>           {actually,  I think a better example is trade: [we exchanged
> goods]}
> "intransitive": 1 experiencer   [John learnt]
> "intransitive, focused": 1 experiencer, 1 focus [John learnt
> lingustics]
<blink>  That's a lot of options!

> Anyway the conlang is VSO, so a verb followed by 3 nouns could mean
> any of those things, with only the vowel sequence of the verb to
> distinguish them. As the language rather hinges on the verbs, I'm a
> little reluctant to press on until I'm sure I've covered all angles.
> So can anyone here please suggest anything I may have missed.
Hmm.  Socketable verbs?  (Sorry, all my housemates play Diablo II...and
so do I, come to think of it, though not as obsessively.)  You have
"socketable" weapons in which you can put some combination of gems, each
of which has a different effect (e.g. rubies for fire resistance,
sapphires for cold resistance, etc.--simplified version).  So if you had
a "socketable" verb it could take any (or some?) of these varieties of
arguments, and the "gem type" (inflection?  particle?  meep? on the
nouns) would tell you what "effects" you got (reciprocal, etc.).

This is probably a very bad way to express something that's easily
explained elsewise, but it just occurred to me.  I wouldn't mind hearing
other options myself; transitivity was something I never understood in HS
(...mainly because grammar wasn't taught, period) and it's something I
have trouble dealing with.

YHL