Re: Head-marking languages and adpositions?

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 12:44:24AM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Many of these questions are addressed in Johana Nichols' book
> _Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time_:
>
> It's not for the beginner, but it addresses all sorts of statistical
> correlations in re head-markedness.
Looks interesting, but is expensive and Amazon doesn't have any customer
reviews on it.  How is it organized?  Is it all just statistics or does
it have usage examples, too?  (I'm mostly interested in understanding
what such languages *feel* like... though I guess if I understood the rules
I could construct my own examples.  But examples are key.)

> What exactly do you mean by a "comprehensively" head-marking
> conlang?  Such a language would certainly be odd from the vantage
> point of natural languages, since most natural languages have
> elements of both head-marking and dependent-marking.
I guess I'm just a fan of extreme cases :)  I feel that to understand the
breadth of possible grammars, it can help to internalize extremes from
both ends of a continuum.  For example, in understanding what head-finality
feels like, learning Japanese was very helpful.

Hey, now there's a good idea: a list of the minimal set of languages from
among the world's language families that could exemplify all the different
extremes.  The smallest sample set that would encompass:

        - a good model [isolating | agglutinating | polysynthetic] language
        - a good model [nominative-accusative | ergative | active | trigger]
          language
        - a good model [head-initial | head-final] language
        - a good model [dependent-marking | head-marking] language

with as much overlap as possible, for the smallest set of languages necessary
to be learned to intuitively understand the full range of options.  Any more
features we should add? :)

Amanda

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