Re: THEORY: NATLANGS: Pro-Forms

>1) What other "parts of speech" have pro-forms in various natlangs?
>
>--
>
>In particular:
>
>2) Does any natlang have one or more pro-adposition(s)?
>
>3) Does any natlang have one or more pro-conjunction(s)?
I suspect these won't be occuring anywhere; the latter more strongly so.
Much information will be lost if these are all collapsed into one and the
same.
-Languages with "all-purpose adpositions" do exist (IIRC Iwo was one of
them), but that's not the same.


>4) Does any natlang have one or more pro-interjection(s)?
>4a) Does that question even make sense?
Why not? An "all-purpose interjection" sounds quite plausible, and regular
nouns such as "shout" or, indeed, "interjection" can already be used to
refer to all interjections. Combining the two as "an aaaa" (for example)
wouldn't be much of a leap.


>5) Does any natlang have one or more pro-pronoun(s)?
>5a) Wouldn't that be gilding the lily and carrying coal to Newcastle?
Selling sand in Sahara indeed.. I don't really see what you're attempting
here.
Of course, pronouns can seemingly refer to other pronouns:
"She, _who_ would eventually turn out to be N.N, was..."
but in reality "she" and "who" both here refer to N.N.
Another direction could be to refer to the pronouns as words:
"'I' and 'me' are first-person pronouns; _they_ always refer to the
speaker."
But this doesn't seem to be pronoun-specific in any way; any word can be
similarily talked about as a phonological form.


>6) Does any natlang have one or more pro-adjective(s)?
>
>7) Does any natlang have one or more pro-adverb(s)?
Finnish, and I suspect most agglutinativ languages, can easily derive these
from pronouns. Off the top of my head, I can think of adjectival, methodic,
temporal and in-locativ forms. (There is also an ad-locativ version of the
last series, but that is primarily used as adpositions.) They are based on
the demonstrative pronouns "this, that, it"; the relative pronouns "that,
which";and the interrogative pronouns "what, which". Adjectival forms can be
formed out of personal pronouns too; there are also forms derived from
"either", but with rather idiomatic usage.


>10) ObConLang: What conlangs have pro-form verbs?  Do these verbs also have
>lexically content-full uses?  Please, describe and explain.
The uwjge verbal system is currently based on a series of pro-verbs, from
which all other verbs are derived. I haven't worked on it in a while to
remember all of it, but there's one for each semantic field-
*Moovment relativ to time
*-//- relativ to another spatial direction
*Physical, chemical and biological changes in shape, form, or phase
*Thought, feelings etc. psychological actions
*Electromagnetic, radioactive, magical etc. "at-distance" actions
They can also be combined; especially #4 with #1 or #3 for expressing the
volitionality of actions.


>11) ObConLang: What conlangs have "pro-sentences"?
>Thanks,
>eldin
These are usually collapsed with pronouns, aren't they? _That_ seems to be
typical.

John Vertical