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Re: Short Question: Actant

From:Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
Date:Saturday, September 3, 2005, 16:58
Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
> > The use of these clitics on the first and second persons--outside > > of pronouns, where they are frequent--is admittedly rare, > > Not rare, _unknown_. Totally ungrammatical in any dialect I'm > familiar with, or can even imagine, really.
Your example "I, the president, am talking to you" would _invariably_ be spoken that way, barring special emphasis on "am". It merely can't be written that way--in writing the apposition must be set off by commas, and "-'m" can't stand on its own so "president, 'm" is disallowed.
> > but again this is most likely due to habits of speech making the > > use of nouns to refer to the first and third person rare. :p
(I meant first and second, of course)
> In any case, the more you go beyond the original construction (e.g. by > considering pronouns), the more clear it is that these aren't > person/number affixes, but clitic copulas, and moreover the main verb > in the sentence.
Yes, I do know the standard analysis. That's not the usual meaning of "main verb" though (which in this example would be "talk")... it's a auxiliary verb.
> It's not a case of "person marking on nouns", but > "indexing of person on an element that's phonologically attached to > the last word of the subject noun phrase".
Yes. I only made the strong claim for my conlang. :p I was mainly giving an example of how it could be seen to happen. *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Replies

Tim May <butsuri@...>Person marking on nouns
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>