Re: THEORY: languages without arguments

At 4/19/00 02:48 AM -0400, you wrote:

>Greetings!  Are you a professional linguist?
Not yet.  I'm just starting graduate school.  This just happens to be the
topic
I worked on in an independent study class last quarter.

>> (If "pig" and "this" or "all" and "egg" change places, the sentences are
>> ungrammatical.)
>
>So, is it correct to say that the adjective must precede the noun, but
>it doesn't matter how many things go between them?
There are no "adjectives" in Mohawk (like in many polysynthetic languages.)
Adjectives are all verbs in some kind of a reduced relative clause.  I was
refering to demonstratives and quantifiers.  As long as they are adjacent to
the noun, the order does not matter.  It is only when they separate that they
must precede the noun.

>> Except that you can get nominals without the "adpositions".  In colloquial
>> Japanese, if the grammatical function of the noun can be determined from
>> context, the particle is frequently left off.
>
>Is this a recent development, perhaps influenced by Western languages,
>or is this an ancient phenomenon?  If the first, could it be that
>Japanese is simply in the midst of a change?  If the second, then it
>would be a challenge to the theory, or at least to Japanese's status as
>an example.
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) and an emotional particle of some sort (-(w)o).  There is also
dialectal variation on exactly when adpositions may be dropped.

>What kind of situations?  I was under the impression that Japanese NEVER
>placed anything after the verb.
In formal speech I don't think the can.  But back when I was studying
Japanese,
my TA would be talking to us and add words into the sentence after the
verb.  I
think she was putting them in as an afterthought, but there wasn't always a
pause.  Whenever she did that, the words were case marked.  Probably she was
speaking like she would to another native, forgetting that we didn't have the
experience to know what was being left out, so she would add them in later.

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.

Marcus Smith