Re: Newbie says hi

Mat McVeagh writes:
 > >From: Tim May <butsuri@...>
 > >
 > >  > > How about this for a suggestion: a language that doesn't clearly
 > >  > > have the categories "word", "phrase", "sentence". Instead it has
 > >  > > other levels of grammatical scale and structure,
 > >  >
 > >  > I was just reading about this the other day.  I think it was in the
 > >  > book "Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Volume 2,
 > >  > Complex Constructions", which I bought a few years ago after it was
 > >  > (yes) recommended on this list :) Anyway, whichever book it was, I
 > >  > was reading a section on chaining languages.  They specifically
 > >  > mentioned that some of these languages seemed to have nothing
 > >  > corresponding to a sentence; rather, they naturally organized into
 > >  > simple clauses and paragraph-length chains of clauses.
 > >  >
 > >As an example of this kind of thing (I think) here's a little story in
 > >Classical Tibetan, with interlinear, which I found on Scott DeLancey's
 > >website.
 > >
 > >http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/sb/BOYBIRD.HTM
 >
 > Fascinating. I would categorise this as extreme concatenation, or
 > co-ordination (as in co-ordinate conjunctions and clauses). It is just about
 > possible to imagine some of those sentences as one sentence in English, if
 > you put a few semi-colons in. I wonder however how common this sort of
 > construction was in Classical Tibetan in ordinary speech. That piece was a
 > story, and so can be stylised into an unusual syntax perhaps. One barrier to
 > endless concatenation of clauses is that your memory runs out and your chain
 > of thought does not connect so well as to be able to continue in that
 > fashion.
 >

I d'net know how common it is (I'm _trying_ to study Tibetan, but the
only book I can find was first published in 1883, and I think the one
I've ordered is actually out of print).  I think this kind of clause
chaining is a special case of the serial verb constructions discussed
in this FAQ entry:

http://enamyn.free.fr/conlang/id08.html

and also in some of DeLancey's papers and lectures on
grammaticalization, available from the same site as the story.

These appear to be common in these languages, although they don't
necessarily go to the lengths where you'd have multiple sentences in
English.