Re: nominator sentences (was Re: cases)

On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 09:04:17PM -0400, Jonathan Chang wrote:
[snip]
>     This idea: niceness. A very intriguing idea that I like a lot. We - me
> with Caos Pidgin & you with Project N (Nominative) - can come up with a "new"
> subclass of isolating languages called "elliptical." ;)
[snip]

Oooh, perhaps I should tell you that besides nominator sentences, my
conlang also features another (weird?) type of sentence called the
Summaritive sentences. Summaritive sentences are like the logical
complement of nominator sentences: nominators set the scope/topic of
further discourse, whereas summaritives *summarize* and re-highlights the
main points from preceding discourse.

What makes summaritives special is that they aren't what English speakers
might consider a sentence: there are neither nouns nor verbs (or at least,
nouns and verbs would only occur in subordinate clauses); summaritives
consist solely of "relatives". Relatives in the lang are a large class of
words which include particles, adpositions, and other words that describe
the relationship between words, clauses, sentences, or even entire
passages. Multiple-inflection relatives work by being marked for more than
one noun case / verb conjugation at a time, thus "linking" the nouns/verbs
that have those inflections.

The idea behind a summaritive sentence is to recapture the main ideas and
the inter-relationships between the main ideas from preceding discourse,
by using special markers for the main ideas (somewhat like an emphatic
tag), and then attaching these tags to summaritive relatives. This way, a
sequence of relatives can "recall" previously mentioned nouns/verbs/etc..

Of course, as you might tell if you read the above carefully, ;-) I
haven't developed summaritives that much yet; at least not as much as I
developed the nominators. So things might change... but the basic idea
remains.


T