Re: The Language Code

On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 05:02  PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...> writes:
>> n       number
>>         s       singular
>>         d       dual
>>         t       trial
>>         p       plural
>>         f       paucal ("just a Few things")
>>         a       distributive ("things All over the place")
>>         g       collective ("things Grouped together")
>>         ...
>
> Hmm, isn't that distributive vs. collective, i.e., a different
> category than mere number?  Or am I wrong there?
Not necessarily. In Miapimoquitch, there is no plural as such; there
are paucal, distributive, and collective, each of which is mutually
exclusive of the other. Since paucal is a number, I assume that
distributive and collective are also numbers, at least for
Miapimoquitch.

> I thought e.g. the
> English numbers are all distributive and to get a collective meaning,
> you either use a different word (like 'cattle') or use
> 'herd'/'flock'/'swarm'/'group'.  But maybe I got that wrong.
Distributive and collective can certainly be categories separate from
number; listing these categories as values for the attribute "number"
is done to accomodate languages which are like Miapimoquitch. It's
worth looking into; there's an excellent study of linguistic number by
Greville Corbett which I'll chase down later today.

> My current conlang research project (*grin*) has nullar, singular,
> dual, trial, plural, paucal and 'any-number' (the default without
> morpheme is 'unspecified number').  By default, they are all
> distributive(?), but they can be applied more than once, making all
> but the last one collective:
>
>    cat.PLURAL       =   (several) cats
>    cat.PLURAL.DUAL  =   two (groups/sets/...) of (several) cats
>
> The 'any-number' makes collectives without constraining the number,
> so:
>    cat.PLURAL.ANY   =   (groups/group) of (several) cats
I like this!

> By the way, I don't know the following terms in the syntax|arg
> category:
>
>>>>                h       hierarchical
>
> What's that?
In Navajo, arguments are aligned with respect to their position on an
animacy hierarchy such that the higher argument is understood to be the
subject in the absence of overt verbal marking to the contrary. That
is, in a sentence containing the elements 'man', 'dog', and 'kick'
'man' will be understood to be the subject since it is higher on the
animacy hierarchy. To get the other meaning, the verbal prefix yi-
(indicating 3. person subject) is replaced with bi-.

>>>>                t       topic/focus
>
> What's that?  (I know what topic and focus are, but how can they be
> used for argument structure?)
Maybe a more familiar term is 'trigger system'; Austronesian languages
of the Philipines do this -- verbal inflection is sensitive to the
topic/focus structure of the utterance rather than semantic roles or
some other such system.

Thanks for the comments.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie