zompist bboard

In "I gave her a drink" and "I gave her an iguana" how do you tell the difference between the A and the R ? That is, How is "I gave her a drink" distinguished from "She gave me a drink"? and how is "I gave her an iguana" distinguished from "She gave me an iguana"? Word order. I forgot to mention th...

I agree that that's interesting. Your idea that "I give her a drink" is something "I" do to "a drink", using "her" as an instrument, strikes me as wrong, though; it's something "I" do to/for "her", using "a drink" as an instrument, IMO. But according to Blake, the cases that should get named "dativ...

oookay. So I wrote earlier that I had not thought through how to treat ditransitive clauses, and that I'd think up something interesting. I've come up with it, and it's... ...kinda the same thing. Same thing as the A/P distinction for animate and inanimate nouns, that is. This is because animate and...

I've come up with a morphosyntactic system for a conlang I'm working on, and I figured I'd tell it in here to see 1) what pplz think and 2) if it has any natlang precedent. Here goes: Without commenting on anyone else's comments, I'd say; it looks a lot like a combination of: a hierarchical alignme...

It sounds like you simply have an inflectional morpheme that marks an animate as a patient and an inanimate as an agent. So, it seems accusative. With an interesting twist, but still accusative. That said, intransitives have some sort of split-s (aka Active-Stative) system going on. I guess that's ...

It sounds like you simply have an inflectional morpheme that marks an animate as a patient and an inanimate as an agent. So, it seems accusative. With an interesting twist, but still accusative. That said, intransitives have some sort of split-s (aka Active-Stative) system going on. I guess that's ...

I've come up with a morphosyntactic system for a conlang I'm working on, and I figured I'd tell it in here to see 1) what pplz think and 2) if it has any natlang precedent. Here goes: The alignment could overall be considered as active , particularly Split-S : S = A for certain intransitive verbs, a...