Re: Short Question: Actant

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!
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