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Re: nominator sentences (was Re: cases)

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Monday, September 11, 2000, 12:10
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