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