Re: Miapimoquitch (was Re: Newbie says hi)

At 12:15 PM -0500 11/15/02, Jeff Jones wrote:
>Hi Dirk,
>Sorry for the delay; I keep reading this over and I'm still confused about
>some things, so I'm responding to only some of it at this time (below).
>
>On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:53:13 -0700, Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>
>wrote:
>
>>At 7:16 PM -0500 11/8/02, Jeff Jones wrote:
>>>On Fri, 8 Nov 2002 10:14:18 -0700, Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm wrestling with similar issues in Miapimoquitch, but the problem for
>>>> me centers around the switch reference markers. Miapimoquitch shows no
>>>> formal distinction between 'noun' and 'verb'; all lexical stems are
>>>> inflected alike. This inflection includes transitivity, which must be
>>>> explicitly marked for any predicate regardless of its lexical semantics,
>>>> and a prefix indicating the object (subjects are marked by proclitics
> >>> and are outside the inflectional system proper.)
>[snip]
>>>Also, can you give examples with object prefixes?
>>
>>There are no object prefixes.
>
>I must have misunderstood the original post where it says "a prefix
>indicating the object".
Eek. Did I really say that? Yep, I did (I just looked). The earlier statement was
wrong; there are in fact no object prefixes. But the question raises another
problem. The problem is that the transitive marker _n-_ is only intended to
mark a transitive predicate. So for transitive predicates, unless the person
clitic is _le=_ (2>1; i.e., both subject and object), the object is understood
to be third person. But these are exactly the predicates which are marked with
_n-_, so it ends up looking like a third person object marker. But it's really
not.

> >There are three proclitic person markers:
>>
>>wa= '1'
>>ku= '2'
>>le= '2>1' (i.e., second person acting on first person)
>>
>> When the transitivity marker _n-_ is present, the first and second person
>> proclitics mark arguments which act upon a third person.
>>
>>wankipe a'ulese
>>wa= n-  kipe a=  ulese
>>1=  TR- poke DS= bear
>>'I poked the bear.'
>>
>>lenkipe
>>le=  n-  kipe
>>2>1= TR- poke
>>'You poked me.'
>
>I see. Defining just one extra person marker (2>1), you avoid having to add
>2 person markers (I wonder if I can steal it). I suppose you probably
>mentioned it before ....
I don't remember if I did. The original inspiration for this was hearing about
the person hierarchy in Yuman languages, which I had understood to be 2>1>3 (I
think Algonquian languages have the same hierarchy). In the earliest version of
Miapimoquitch (then Tepa), I envisioned the argument prefixes as "vectors"
indicating a direction of activity, rather than as portmanteaux encoding the
subject and object. Transitive verbs used the same set of prefixes as
intransitive verbs. By assuming that third persons were marked with a zero, I
only needed to add _le-_ for the transitive sentences when first and second
persons interacted. Transitivity was a lexical property of the verb.

When I started revising the grammar, I did away with the distinction between verb
and noun; however, this meant that all lexical items could be inflected alike
for tense/aspect and argument structure. If there was still a divide between
those items which were inherently transitive and those which were inherently
intransitive, then I hadn't really done away with nouns and verbs. So the
marking of transitivity became obligatory, and the lack of such marking would
indicate only that the predicate was intransitive, not that it was a noun.

I kept the person hierarchy, but I reinterpreted it so that the external
argument (subject) must be higher than the internal argument (object) on the
hierarchy. The only holdover from the earlier "vector" system is _le=_, the 2>1
marker, which I like too much to get rid of. Besides, as you point out, it
means that I never need two person markers for a predicate; at most, a person
marker and a transitivity prefix.

> > There are two other prefixes which compete for the transitivity slot:
> > _l-_, which inverts the hierarchical order of the arguments, and _qa"-_,
>> which is reflexive/middle. The inverse marker forces the interpretation
>> of the person proclitics _wa=_ and _ku=_ as objects with a third person
>> subject:
>>
>>walpike a'ulese
>>wa= l-   kipe a=  ulese
>>1=  INV- poke DS= bear
>>'The bear poked me.'
>>
>> For the person proclitic _le=_ the inverse marker forces a reading of
>> first person acting on second person:
>
>This too. Inversion markers are neat. I have one in my latest prospective
>language and am still exploring the possibilities.
Inversion was also "forced" on me because of my assumptions about the person hierarchy.
If the external argument was lower on the hierarchy than the internal argument,
there needed to be a way to encode that. After all, third persons act on first
and second persons all the time. Using the prefix _l-_ does just this job; it
indicates that the person clitic encodes the internal argument and not the
external argument.

> >lelpike
>>le=  l-   pike
>>2>1= INV- poke
>>'I poked you.'
>
>Is {pike} a typo, or is there some kind of syllable reversal process also?
It's a typo. The similarity with 'poke' was too much for me.

>BTW, are you still not getting copies of your posts?
No. But I bcc myself whenever I send to the list, so I'm okay for now.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson