Re: THEORY: languages without arguments

Nik Taylor worte:

>Marcus Smith wrote:
>> There are no "adjectives" in Mohawk (like in many polysynthetic languages.)
>> Adjectives are all verbs in some kind of a reduced relative clause.
>
>Functionally, they serve as adjectives.
Agreed, but I wouldn't call them "adjectives", just say they function
adjectivally.  Nothing important hangs on the terminalogical difference.

>> I think it is a hold-over from Old Japanese.  OJ apparently didn't have
case
>> marking for subjects and objects -- they were recently developed from a
>> genitive (-ga)
>
>Interesting.  Then where did _no_ come from, and when did it begin to
>replace -ga?
Even today, _no_ is not a genitive: it is a general attributive marker.  It
connects two nouns together, often in a possesser-possessed relationship, or
marks the object of a clause modifiying a noun.

Tookyoo no tikatetu
Tokyo     no subway
"the subways in Tokyo"

sakana no  yaku      nioi
fish       no  broil(v)   smell
"the smell of (someone's) broiling fish"

>> There is also the noun koto "fact" which often appears at the end of a
>> sentence, but that has a purely grammatical function now, as far as I can
>> tell.
>
>Interesting.  What is that function?
Nominalizing mostly, but sometimes I can't figure our why a particular clause
needed to be nominalized, so there could be another function.  The first
sentence is a clear nominalizing context.  The second is odd.

[Mori-san wa    uta-o          utatta] koto-ga         arimasu.
name      TOP song-OBJ  sang  KOTO-SUBJ exists
"Mr Mori has sung a song before."

[Boku no     syumi wa     kitte-o           atumeru] koto   desu
I      POSS  hobby TOP  stamp-OBJ collect    KOTO be.
"My hobby is collecting stamps."

These can't be relative clauses because the topic marker -wa cannot be used in
an embedded clause.  But I think they were historically derived from relatives
because translating them as one makes sense.  "The fact that Mr. Mori sang a
song exists" and "My hobby is the fact that (I) collect stamps."  Perhaps a
bit
odd, but arguable.

Marcus Smith