Re: Newbie says hi

At 2:41 AM -0500 11/8/02, Jeff Jones wrote:
>On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 12:56:06 -0700, Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>
>wrote:
>
>>At 8:22 PM -0500 11/4/02, Nathaniel G. Lew wrote:
>>>On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 23:07:12 +0000, Mat McVeagh <matmcv@...>
>wrote:
>>>
>>>>10) Similarly, on a grammatical level, I would like to design one that
>>>>broke out of a few common constraints of both natural and artificial
>>>>languages.
>>>>Something that broke down the verb/noun/adjective etc. hegemony, or
>>>>isolating/inflecting/agglutinative. 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, which don't match up to those three. Imagine what that would
>>>>do to the morphology/syntax division, or the three typological
>>>>categories. I am very interested in Eskimo actually.
>>>
>>>[*shameless self-promotion*]
>>>
>>>Bendeh makes no distinction between nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  All
>>>words (including prepositions) are substantives.
>>
>>I just looked at the website, and you distinguish between "concrete",
>>"stative", and "dynamic" words; only "stative" and "dynamic" words get to
>>be transitive or intransitive. Sounds like nouns and verbs to me. So what
>>is the difference between what you describe for Bendeh and the more
>>traditional notions of 'noun' and 'verb'? Clearly there is a morpho-
>>syntactic difference between concrete words on the one hand, and stative
>>and dynamic words on the other.
>
>Hi Dirk,
>
>I'm hoping for more discussion, since some of this applies to my languages
>as well, but I haven't seen a reply from Nat Lew yet. I suspect that "no
>distinction" was an unintentional overstatement on his part. I may have
>misread his website, but I think that the difference between "concrete",
>"stative" and "dynamic" is *morphosemantic* (if that's a term) but not
>*syntactic*.
That may be, but I was talking about the formal properties of the words in
question. Stative and dynamic words are alike in being potentially transitive
and selecting for a direct object; concrete words do not permit this. While the
distinction between the classes can be cast in semantic terms, the website is
pretty clear in demonstrating that transitivity is a formal property which
involves object pronouns and accusative case marking. The lack of such formal
marking for concrete words seems to put them in a separate category, which just
happens to look like traditional nouns.

I'm not just taking potshots at Bendeh; I'm wrestling with similar issues in
Miapimoquitch, but the problem for me centers around the switch reference
markers. Miapimoquitch shows no formal distinction between 'noun' and 'verb';
all lexical stems are inflected alike. This inflection includes transitivity,
which must be explicitly marked for any predicate regardless of its lexical
semantics, and a prefix indicating the object (subjects are marked by
proclitics and are outside the inflectional system proper.)

The switch reference system includes a set of proclitics which mark whether the
subject of a subordinate clause is the same as or different from the subject of
the matrix clause. Here are a couple of sentences:

nkipe aqiiwika  [i'kiB1 a'Ni:wiGa]
n-  kipe a=  qiiwi     -ka
TR- poke DS= whistle:U -UN
'He/she/it poked the (one who is) whistling.'

The subject of the subordinate clause is different from the subject of the main
clause, and this difference determines the selection of _a=_ as the determiner
(glossed here "DS" = 'different subject').

nkipe eqiiwika  [i'kiB1 1'Ni:wiGa]
n-  kipe e=  qiiwi     -ka
TR- poke SS= whistle:U -UN
'The (one who is) whistling poked him/her/it.'

Here the subject of the subordinate clause is the same as the subject of the main
clause, so the determiner _e=_ is used (glossed here "SS" = 'same subject.')

If you squint, the clitics _a=_ and _e=_ look like case markers since _a=_
appears on a subordinate clause which is coreferential with the object of the
main clause and _e=_ appears on a subordinate clause which is coreferential
with the subject of the main clause. This means that there may in fact be a
formal distinction between nouns and verbs; nouns have case marking (nee switch
reference markers), verbs don't. I'm not entirely pleased with this
development.

> >Look at Nootka or the Salish languages if you're interested in languages
> >which have been described as having no noun/verb distinction (though not
> >everyone agrees on that description).
>
>I took your suggestion myself and googled for Nootka language.
>Unfortunately, I have no skill at web searches, and got more results than I
>could look through. A lot of descriptions of books I can't buy, and pages
>with only incidental references, mostly by conlangers. There was one that
>mentioned Chinese language classes at Nootka elementary school.
If you have access to a university library, that would be a good place to look.
Some have also made the same claim about Salish languages; that might be
another avenue of web research. Sorry I can't be more helpful than that!

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson