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Re: Moro Cases (was Re: some of... vs. some... et al.)

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Thursday, March 3, 2005, 19:18
> Uh...head-marking? I've never been good at this.
Yeah. The basic difference is that agreement patterns tend in languages to be marked either on the phrasal heads (the verb in VPs, the noun in NPs, the preposition in PPs) or their dependents (the NP in VPs and PPs, adjectives in NPs). Case-marking and verb-agreement have, very generally speaking, the same functional role of identifying grammatical relations. Thus, a language which marks such features on both heads and dependents (like, say, Georgian) has a high degree of redundancy, while languages like Chinese have very little. Because languages tend to seek a mean in redundancy, they tend to have some agreement or some case-marking, but not always both. And languages can mark both head and dependent for some grammatical categories (e.g. Latin verb agreement and nominative case on nouns), but only one or the other or none for other categories (e.g. Latin accusative case on NPs).
> Here's a big NP: > > ej jamala iki jeb@tSo /all PLU.-camel this CONC.-white/
It's hard to tell from this gloss here, it looks like you're getting both head and dependent marking, since the noun has a affix denoting some grammatical property, and the dependent adjective has a suffix (which looks alliterative here) marking the same feature. Like Latin or Greek, then. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637