Re: Adjectives vs. stative verbs, plus general info

On Fri, 15 Mar 2002 17:13:50 -0800
Jesse Raccio <jraja0722@...> wrote:

> Well, I am exploring my possiblities for the lang I am
> putting together.  I am curious if anyone else has
> played with removing adjectives all together and
> simply using stative verbs?  I figured that in complex
> sentences one would break it into a stative verb
> phrase and append a tran/intrans verb to these
> phrases.
Yep, I'm doing something like that in my current lang (called ML2 for
the mo) which is the child or brutal bashing into more pleasing form of
another lang (ML) whose [lack of] grammar displeased me.

During this evolution or deformation, verbs and adjectives have partly
fallen together, due to sound change + analogy with some already
existing stative verbs. I say "partly" since while the most commonly
used part of the verb ends in -e (<sfohe evte>, "I love you") while
the commonest form of the adjectives end in -en (<mivlen auncesh> "a
reassuring outcome"), really what is happening is the the 'adjectival'
use is a non-finite form of the verb, [some sort of participle I think].
Where the stative verb is to be used 'verbally' it would typically
be used in a finite form as the main verb of a clause, while being
used 'attributively', you might use a nonfinite form. In fact, these
differences reflect more the degree of focus on the stative-verb clause.

Now the verb "to happen" is <cfide>. Behold:
<cfide auncush>     "the outcome is happening"  ('verbal' usage)
<chfide auncush>    "the outcome was happening" ('verbal' usage)
<chfide de auncush> "the outcome happened"      ('verbal' usage)

<cfiden auncesh>    "the outcome which is happening"  ('adj' usage)
<chfiden auncesh>   "the outcome which was happening" ('adj' usage) (*)
<chfideden auncesh> "the outcome which happened"      ('adj' usage)


>   The happy man went home. would translate best literally as: The man,
>   who is happy, went home.
Yes, < theive de ir  fsaren      cjete>
       departed  the being-happy man

cf, with different emphasis

     <theive de ir  fsare cjete>
      departed the (man is happy), which amounts to an embedded subordinate clause

other possibilities
     <theive de ir  cjete sfee fsare>
      departed  the man   who  happies

     <theive de ir  cjete sfee fsaren>
      departed  the man   who  happy  [verb to be must be supplied in translation]

What the last one means really is that when I say "fsaren cjete",
really, or at least etymologically, 'fsaren' is a genuine adjective and
there is a verb 'to be' omitted - "te fsaren cjete", with 'te' = 'is'.
It's this tendency (very strong) to omit the verb to be that allows
etymological adjectives to be included in the same category as verbs.
I suspect the verb 'to be' doesn't exist in ML2, except maybe as an
'emergency copula'.


>   since the language is to be inflecting I figured one could chain
> together a number of these stative verbs to describe in a few words
> current, past and possible future states of an object.
>
> In english would be something like saying this.
>
> The man, who is happy but was once very unhappy and may soon be
> unhappy again, went home.
>
> yet being able to say it in less words i.e. man happy happy happy pres
> past,neg fut,neg,possible

Very nice, I like that idea. Probably wouldn't work in my lang which is
gradually moving towards every adj. or adverb qualifying a noun-phrase
or verb-phrase having the force of an embedded clause, with minimal use
of 'functional' words and inflections.


> Other info about the lang itself. SOV order, heavily inflecting. 5
> noun classes 6 noun cases. I am toying with ergative/absolutive simply
> because I think it is interesting, never had any expereince of it
> till I bumped into a Basque grammar online. Beside those cases, if I
> go with them, there is Locative, in or on. Allative, to or towards.
> Instructive/Instrumental, means and the stative case which is a null
> case. A syllabic alphabetic script. Lots of fricatives. Very little
> use of the present tense.
>

I made a nice discovery in my (more or less inflecting) lang concerning
word order and the ergative system - you can have ergativity marked by
word order rather than inflection (if ye so desire) just by using an
order such as SOV or VOS, since this gives AOV / VOA for transitive
verbs and SV / VS for intransitives. Simple, but nice I think.


> That is it so far all subject to wild change. I would love to hear
> some comments that may help me work this out.

I really like the idea of an identity between adjs and stative verbs,
especially how it suggests 'inline' subordinate clauses. If you want
to see an example of a language which seems to do this with supreme
elegance, look at chinese.

[ I say seems, since I'm currently learning out of books which think
that syntax is a dirty word and prefer to explain by examples, and seem
to think that examples can teach you how to employ a lang for yourself,
rather than just understand passively. Maybe for some people, but I need
to read a good non-nonsense grammar before I can actually *produce*
the simplest sentence. Hence I await with eagerness the copy of Yip &
Rimmington's 'Basic Chinese' which is currently somewhere in the postal
system... ]


> Thanks
And thanks for the opportunity to explain what I think my language
is doing - it helps to show me that it's really doing something else
entirely ;)

stephen