Re: affixes

Mark J. Reed

>On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 06:01:53PM -0500, # 1 wrote:
> > OK I'll try to reformulate your explaination just to know if I
>understood
>
>It sounds like you understand perfectly.  Some notes:
>
> > Case marks would act that way with a single noun
>
>As with other syntactic models, you can mix analysis and synthesis.  A
>case mark could either be part of the noun, or be a unary operator
>("unary" = "takes one argument").  As an example of this in the
>mathematical world, a negative number like "-123" can be considered as
>an argument  (the - is just part of the number), or as the unary
>operator "-" (negation) applied to the argument "123", which would be in
>postfix something like 123-.  But since using "-" for both subtraction
>and negation would be ambiguous, most postfix systems either allow forms
>like "-123" and treat a - followed by a digit differently from a - by
>itself, or else use a different symbol - for instance, negative numbers
>in the UNIX program dc are marked with a _ instead of a -.
>
> > On verbal operators, I don't know how would be indicated the TAM, would
>they
> > be forced to be affixed on the verb or should there have a third level
>of
> > operators to affect the other operators? There's probably a way to pass
>over
> > it without create 3rd and 4th levels..
>
>Again, it could be either analytic (affixed) or synthetic (an operator).
I tought again about that grammar concept..

Isn't exactly as an SOV, postpositionnal, noun-adj language?

The verb is placed after its arguments to link them; the adpositions modify
the noun they follow, and same thing for the adjectives.


As I see it, a LIFO grammar is only a complicated way to explain a grammar
that is explainable in traditional way?


A sentence like:

dog the big cat your small love = the big dog loves your small cat

could be an SOV, postpositionnal, noun-adj language

The article after "dog" means it is definite, the possessive after "cat"
means who owns it, the adjectives are placed after the nouns and the verb is
at the end of the sentence

But it could also be a LIFO sentence with "the", "your", "big", and "small"
being simple operators and "love" being an operator to link the two
preceding arguments


Is there a difference I didn't see??

- Max

Reply