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Using Case to Show Tense

From:Edward Miller <sewerbird@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 23, 2005, 3:22
After seeing an example of Georgian, and tweaking it to not inflect
the verb, I've come up with a system that looks at the case markings
of participant nouns of a verb to determine its tense.

Essentially, depending upon whether the case markings manifest an
Ergative/Nominative/Tripartite form, you can deduce the tense. Because
I do not yet have any sort of phonology yet, I've been using variables
to represent the case suffixes. The table below shows the system as
is. (I hope it shows up okay on all browsers...)

Tense     System     S     A     P
Past       Erg           X     Y     X
Present   Tri           Y     X     Z
Future     Nom         Z     Z     Y

Ex.:
"He will smile."
He-SUBJECT smile-FUTURE
"He-Z smile."

Ex.:
"I saw him."
I-AGENT see-PAST He-PATIENT
"I-Y see He-X".

To handle complement clauses, where duplicate case endings might
result, I grabbed the English complementizer "that", and used it as a
sort of dummy pronoun that also signalled that the clause following it
fulfilled an argument of the verb.

Ex.:
"I wish that we climbed it"
I-AGENT wish-PRESENT that-PATIENT we-AGENT come-PAST here-PATIENT
"I-X wish that-Z we-Y climb it-X."

In any case, I hope I managed to collect and share my thoughts
cohesively... ^_^;;
Although it is probably another ANADEW, I'd appreciate any advice that
would make this more streamlined/better/etc. I dislike borrowing from
English, my L1, so it'd be interesting to see some possible
replacements for this. Thanks in advance!

Reply

Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>