Re: Whatever Updated

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 19:04:20 -0400, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...>
wrote:

>Hi,
>for those who are following this, I've created an alternate explanation of
>the actant morphology at
>
>http://qiihoskeh.livejournal.com/71719.html
>
>I'm especially interested in hearing from those who found the original
>version confusing.
Some assorted thoughts:

Is there any VOS-internal reason to postulate "lexical verbs" and "lexical
adjectives" (maybe I missed it on one of your other pages)?  Does this just
mean 'words whose English translations are verbs', respectively 'adjectives'?

The "Argument Structure Classes" table is nice and clear and succinct.  It
seems to belong earlier in the description, though, before "Actant Affixes".

I notice that -Rfx /-ri/ is the only actant marker which can't lose its high
vowel.  Is this intentional?

It's quite sensible that 3I- and 3A- prefixes are null in the indicative and
2S- and 2P- are null in the imperative.  I wonder whether it would make more
sense, though, to still call them 3[IA]- and 2[SP]-, instead of 3. and 2.,
even when their realization is null.  That way you could say, for instance,
that the third singular animate and inanimate subjects are always marked by
3I- and 3A-, when they're not marked by 3H-, and that they're just realized
as zero in certain contexts.

Your new explanation seems to have lost any mention of when to actually use
3H- and -3D, except to say that they're not used on a main verb.

But maybe I can work out what 3H- does.  Re the "phrasal usage" section,
when you nullify an argument, is the nullified argument the one that's taken
as the referent of the "syntactic noun/adjective" as a whole?  I infer this
from your examples, especially (3) (8) (9) (10) where this seems to explain
the things you've translated as relative clauses (in (3) a cleft).  So it
appears that in this situation, when you want A1 to appear as an argument
phrase and not be nullified (i.e.  be the referent), 3H- is called for.  Is
this right?
And when you say about -3A and -3I
  If both appear, the one whose argument is nullified is the one whose
  gender is required by the situation
--- that's because there will be animacy agreement on whatever predicate
this is an argument of, so that one can tell what the referent of this
"syntactic noun/adjective" is supposed to be, yes?

Still in the dark on -3D, in part 'cause there are no examples of complement
clauses or adverbial clauses.

Alex