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Another question for my New Personal Language!

From:Christophe Grandsire <grandsir@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 24, 1999, 6:30
Yes, sorry but I must bother you again with my New Personal Language. I
have nearly finished about the morphology of the adjective (and decided
that I will have adverbs derived from adjectives), but my question is
about the morphology of the complex sentence.

        First, I must remind you that nouns in my language have a construct
state like in Hebrew. This construct state is generally formed by vowel
alterations under stress. What I want to do is to use the same
construction for verbs to differentiate clauses and subclauses. My
problem is to find out which verb should I put in "construct state", the
verb of the clause or the verb of the subclause?

        If I put the verb of the subclause in "construct state", leaving the
verb of the principal clause in "normal state", I have a fine way to
mark relative subclauses completing nouns, and I think I will be more
naturalistic. The problem is that I will lack a nice parallel with the
noun that uses the construct state for the determinee, not the
determiner.

        If I put the verb of the clause in "construct state", leaving the verb
of the subclause unchanged, I have the nice parallel between verbs and
nouns, but I lack this fine way to mark relative subclauses, except if I
put the noun determined by a relative clause in the construct state,
which will be unlikely enough as I see relative clauses more like
adjectives than like noun complements.

        You see my dilemma now. What do you think of it? Should I keep the
parallel between nouns and verbs, or should I get rid of it? Something
important to know is that I don't care about naturality. It's my
personal language and it is already unnatural enough :) . Thank you in
advance.


        Another little thing about this language (oh! I cheated, I only said
"one question" in the title of this post :) ). The default word order in
clauses will be VSO or VOS with incorporation of the object in the verb.
The place just before the verb won't be forbidden, it will be considered
as a marked place (like the place after the verb in Basque). Everything
can be put in front of the verb for topicalization (or the equivalent of
"c'est... que" in French). The thing is that the topicalized noun must
be reminded inside the core of the clause, because complements must
follow the verb, and especially prepositionnal phrases. My idea is then
to use a resumptive pronoun special for this use. It will be used in
place of the topicalized noun in its normal place in the clause, and
will be completed by prepositions, adjectives or complements as a real
noun. To give you an example of what it would be in English:

I see the white house of the president. (silly example I know)

will become:

the house I see white it of the president.

        What do you think of it? Should I let the definition and plural with
the noun or put them on the pronoun too, leaving the topicalized noun
completely uninflected, like that:

house I see the white it of the president.

        Thank you for your help.

--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
        Prof. Holstlaan 4
        5656 AA Eindhoven
        The Netherlands

        Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
        E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com