Re: Inverse marking (was: Kijeb text uploaded)

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006 12:42:34 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
wrote:
> Jeffrey Jones skrev:
> > On Sun, 9 Apr 2006 19:31:20 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I have uploaded a short Kijeb text with interlinear
> > > analysis to <http://wiki.frath.net/Kijeb_texts>.
> >
> > I see that you have one of my favorite language features: inverse
> > marking.
>
> Yeah, I thought it fitted in an animate-inanimate system!
>
> Originally I had inverse marking whenever the agent was
> higher in the Nominal Hierarchy than the patient, but
> Alex Fink on this list thought that be unrealistic, so
> I changed it so that inverse marking is used only when
> the agent is inanimate and the patient animate
> <http://tinyurl.com/njes8>,<http://tinyurl.com/o4mll>,
> <http://wiki.frath.net/Nominal_Hierarchy>, but now it
> seems from a remark in Barry Blake's book "Case"
> that there actually are natlangs that operate as I first
> envisaged.  What is your opinion on this?
I'm not an expert on what natlangs do, but I'm sure some (Potawatomi?) use
the hierarchy. BTW, did you really mean "inverse ... agent was *higher*"?
Shouldn't it be the opposite?

Anyways, I usually use inversion for various other purposes, which I don't
have natlang examples for:
(1) With serial verbs, making sure the shared argument is the subject for
each.
(2) With nouns, to invert relationships.
(3) making sure verb forms with argument prefixes but not suffixes don't
occur.

Jeff

>--
>/BP 8^)>
>--
>Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
>
>    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
>    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
>    means "no"!
>
>                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)
>=========================================================================