Re: Parts of Speech - how many?

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 14:29:46 -0400, Harald Stoiber <stoiberh@...>
wrote:

>Who has already implement more parts of speech than a strictly
>"optimized" (whatever that means) or "standard" (whatever _that_
>means! *g*) grammar would have suggested - even more parts of
>speech than the respective type of grammar would typically have?
>Or another way round: Did you already split up a grammatical
>concept in two because you volunteered to have another part of
>speech?
I haven't deliberately tried to increase the number of parts of speech, but
sometimes it just works out that way. For instance, I have three distinct
classes of adjectives in Tirelat. Typical adjectives describe things like
shape, quality, or condition, and can be used as verbs, but Tirelat also
has a class of "identifiers" which clarify which of a number of similar
items it refers to, and can't be used as verbs. Actually, English has a
similar distinction:

the red box -- the box is red
the top drawer -- *the drawer is top
 (you have to say something like "the drawer is the top one")

A third category of adjectives in Tirelat is typically used to refer to
material, like "gold" or "string". These usually correspond to nouns in
English, but they can be used as transitive verbs in Tirelat. You have to
make a compound to use them as nouns (gold-stuff, string-piece).