Re: I'm back (was: Re: Leaving for three weeks...)

Hello!

On 8/26/05, Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> wrote:
>
>
> On 8/25/05, Julia Schnecki Simon <helicula@...> wrote:
[some musings about my verbal inflection system and object agreement]

> I'm not sure how universally this generalization holds, but
> object-incorporated verb forms seem to tend towards an imperfective,
> habitual, or durative interpretation.  It makes sense.  "He hoes the/some
> beans" vs. "He bean-hoes", the second meaning something like "He habitually
> hoes beans" or "He's a bean farmer".
Hoo boy. I had almost forgotten about noun incorporation. What I wrote
above refers to object agreement in the sense of "[I.NOM] read.1sg/3sg
book.ACC", i.e. some morpheme in the verb form that gives us a clue
about which form/gender/number/whatever we should expect the object to
have...

What you write about object-incorporated verb forms and their
interpretation matches my experience, too, but then again, I've only
looked at two languages with noun incorporation so far (Nahuatl and
Mohawk).

Well, three such languages if you count German; some people claim that
in colloquial constructions like _ich bin am Hausaufgabenmachen_ "I'm
(in the middle of) doing my homework" (lit. "I am at [the]
homework-doing"), the noun _Hausaufgaben_ is incorporated into the
verb _machen_. Others consider _Machen_ a deverbal noun in this case
and, therefore, there is no incorporation going on here but rather
noun composition (I think that's the traditional view). YMMV. In any
case, the meaning is definitely imperfective and in most cases I'd
also say durative (not at all habitual, though).

> So maybe a *combined* TAM and object agreement system!
>
> Object agreement (person or class) and PAST suffix = past perfective
> Object incorporation and PAST suffix = past imperfective
> Object agreement (person or class) and NONPAST suffix = nonpast perfective
> Object incorporation and NONPAST suffix = nonpast imperfective
Good idea -- use object incorporation instead of aspect markers... :-)

> Now this necessitates the question of how to deal with aspect in
> intransitive forms.  Perhaps just a neutral interpretation, or an indefinite
> object marker can signal the imperfective.
Yes, an indefinite object marker would be the obvious solution, but
then again, it would be dangerously close to a "real" aspect-marking
morpheme. But maybe I can get around the issue by declaring all
intransitive verbs reflexive in some way or another ("I swim" := "I
make myself float" or some such) and deal with the problem by
incorporating a word that refers to the subject/agent into the verb:

(1a) student.NOM book.ACC read.3sg/3sg "the student reads a/the book"
(1b) student.NOM book-read.3sg "the student habitually reads books"
        (i.e. studies a lot, or is a bookworm)

(2a) dolphin.NOM swim.3sg/0 "the dolphin swims"
(2b) dolphin.NOM REF-swim.3sg "the dolphin habitually swims; dolphins
        are water-dwellers"

(3a) swim.1sg/0 "I swim"
(3b) REF-swim.1sg "I habitually swim"

... where the REF morpheme could be the stem for "self", or a form of
the pronoun for the appropriate noun class...

That system would also solve the problem of how to derive causative
verb forms (which hasn't come up yet, but never mind):

(4a) swim.1sg/3sg boat.ACC "I make the boat swim" (i.e. I'm putting it
        into the water, I steer it along the river, or whatever)
(4b) boat-swim.1sg "I habitually make boats swim" (i.e. I work in a
        shipyard's Quality Assurance department, I'm a steamboat
        helmsman... woman... person... whatever)

Here, one wouldn't really be able to say that causative forms are
derived from "basic" stems as they are in the natlangs I know that
have causative forms; instead, the stems of all the verbs where this
kind of thing makes sense semantically would be ambiguous in that
regard, but each concrete verb form would have a causative or
noncausative meaning depending on the kind of stem that is
incorporated ("self"/pronoun/"neutral" : noun).

I like it. :-)


[noun classes]

> From Totonacan: body-part based noun classes.  The following are examples of
> numerical classifiers, these and similar roots also show up in verb
> derivation/noun incorporation, nominal derivation, and locatives.
>
> qaqa-  (ear) handles
> chaa- (trunk) sprouts, branches
> kilh-  (mouth) holes
> laq- (face) parts/divisions
> pish- (neck) bunches of flowers of leaves
> paa- (belly) sacks, containers
> kaak- (head) houses, squash
>
> and so on.
Nice. :-) Once I've decided on a set of noun classes, let's see if I
can come up with a matching set of concepts from whose names I could
derive the classifiers.

[snip some ways of coming up with, and populating, noun classes]


> > I've also started thinking [...]
> > about number systems (I'm leaning towards something basically decimal
> > with remnants of older duodecimal ["dozen" etc.] and vigesimal [think
> > Danish -- "halfway-through-the-third-score" instead of
> "fifty", and
> > the like] patterns). These two areas obviously still need a lot of
> > fleshing out, though.
>
> Since you started with a Mesoamerican inspiration, maybe overcounting is in
> order.
> For 32, not "two and thirty" but "two towards fourty"!
I think that's where the Finnish numbers between 11 and 19 come from;
their literal meanings are "one of the second (decade)", etc. I've
heard people use similarly-formed numerals for numbers above twenty as
well, but only rarely and usually humorously. (For example, when a
friend turned 41, her husband remarked that she's now "really 50"
because her age is "one of the fifth decade", or something like that.)

Actually I did have something like this in mind for my language...
It's almost natural, once you're working with a system where 30 is
"the first half of the second score"; "two into the second half of the
second score" is (IMHO) a much more consistent way of expressing "32"
than "halfway through the second score, and then two" would be! (Even
though the Danes seem to disagree.) ;-)

Regards,
Julia

--
   Julia Simon (Schnecki) -- Sprachen-Freak vom Dienst
_@"  schnecki AT iki DOT fi / helicula AT gmail DOT com  "@_
si hortum in bybliotheca habes, deerit nihil
                                        (M. Tullius Cicero)

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