Re: head-initial structure

Garrett Jones <alkaline@...> wrote:
>i'm considering having no inflectional affixes at all, with plurality and
>tense appearing as quantifiers and auxiliary verbs. But, derivation will be
>prefixing. Are you not doing derivation at all?
I am eliminating it as much as possible, with the exception that
I have a class of particles that occur between article and the
headword which act like Loglan/Lojban converters--better to call
them voice operators I think though.  In addition, there are case
markers which occur before the article.  With the exception of
case markers, articles, and voice operators I can't think of any
affixes or particles that will be required by the syntax.
Everything else is analytic and optional.

As far as compounding, I am now leaning strongly towards simple
case marking wherever semantically justifiable.  For example,
"computer user" -> "user of computer", where "of" is actually
a patient marker tagging the argument of the underlying verb
"use".  I am still mulling how morphologically to handle the
other class of compounds, the ones in which the relationship
between header and modifier is vague or unclear.  For example,
it is an error to analyze a "bluebird" as "a bird that is blue"
or even a "bird that is commonly blue"; really what we mean
is a "bird of the subtype CALLED blue" ("blue" is really a
name here, semantically not an attribute at all.)  I suppose
a "genitive case" marker could work here, but I think this is
an example of where I'd prefer some sort of new word to a phrase.

BTW If you choose to implement inflections, I do think you
have the right idea regarding placing them in front, near
the header, as you mentioned in the other post.

Regards

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