zompist bboard

By "Perpetrators" and "Victims" do you perchance mean "Agents" and "Patients" , or "Actors" and "Undergoers"? I've been hesitant to answer that question because I fear it will limit the possibilities of the new language. At first I thought actor/patient was the way to go but I grew more uncertain w...

roninbodhisattva wrote: ...will be moved out of their base positions?

I'm not understanding. Please, could you explain what this means?

Your notion of "Topic" and "Comment" doesn't seem to be the same as what most people mean when they say a language has a "Topic-Comment" structure. I know what you're saying. Portuguese/French uses stuff like "the elephants, they are big" or "my mother, she speaks well." This isn't what I'm going f...

Cheers Tom :D Is any of that re-assuring? Yes. In honesty, if you had tried to tell me otherwise I'd have said, "too bad, my language my rules." Your notion of "Topic" and "Comment" doesn't seem to be the same as what most people mean when they say a language has a "Topic-Comment" structure. I know ...

:?: The head of a PP is a preposition, right? For your explicit case, if adpositions can only occur in production rules such as Adjective-likePhrase --> Pronominal-or-NominalPhrase + PostPosition Adverb-likePhrase --> Pronominal-or-NominalPhrase + PostPosition or only in rules such as Adjective-lik...

:idea: :idea: :idea: Here's a thought... I treat ambipositions like verbs, marking the definite post-verbally and the indefinite pre-verbally. Then somehow relativize this structure, allowing it to function as the pre/post-verbal argument of a verb higher up the register. Because definiteness is ass...

Why not just change it? That's not how this exercise is designed to work. going further with the inclusivity metaphor shenanigans to amuse myself, you've also ended up just describing your voiceless unaspirated stops as "unaspirated" and then use Maori words to demonstrate this. Now since we've alr...

When I was planning Umu, I decided to go for something loosely head-final, and keep a comment-topic structure. At first, I opted for prepositions... comment // topic on // table 'on' commenting of the topic 'table'. Now I'm playing with the notion of adpositions as verbs, using the pre/post-verbal p...

Why, because people who don't know IPA will see a pronunciation guide? 1) How many people who don't know IPA will be reading your blog and 2) even if they read it and don't know IPA, if they come from a different dialect/have a different pronunciation than the standard your using, they will be usin...

Everything you think you know about pronunciation is only true in your area of your country. I guess for that reason you got a point . But why be exclusive when you could be inclusive? Well, you're not being inclusive in a way, because the pronunciations that are being referenced by the "as in X" s...

Everything you think you know about pronunciation is only true in your area of your country. I guess for that reason you got a point . But why be exclusive when you could be inclusive? Well, you're not being inclusive in a way, because the pronunciations that are being referenced by the "as in X" s...

oh god, why would you use IPA and still keep in the blasted "as in X" things? You know, some of us have [ɔ] or [ɒ] – a rounded back vowel – in 'cot'. What then? Also i'm not convinced that [ɨ] in roses is anything more than a kludge by wikipedians to represent something that can be either [ɪ] or [ə...

http://pseudoglyphs.wordpress.com/2010/ ... anization/

In GB (mainstream generative grammar from the 80's) the topic was usually a specifier of the CP. From the 90's onwards the topic is usually understood to be the specifier of a projection called TopicP (sometimes abbreviated to TopP). ++++ I think the idea that there are heads has been around since ...

Question: Is there a topic-prominent language where verbs agree with the topic, rather than the subject? The only topic-prominent language I know with verbal inflection (Japanese) does not have concord... From my limited understanding, topics don't need to have any semantic relationship with the ve...

Infl? Can you tell me what this means? Please It's the head of the of a functional projection called the IP, the inflectional phrase , which is taken to be synonymous with the clause in the generative framework. It's where inflection like agreement, tense, aspect, etc. is located. I believe this lo...

Question: Is there a topic-prominent language where verbs agree with the topic, rather than the subject? The only topic-prominent language I know with verbal inflection (Japanese) does not have concord... From my limited understanding, topics don't need to have any semantic relationship with the ve...

Infl? Can you tell me what this means? Please It's the head of the of a functional projection called the IP, the inflectional phrase , which is taken to be synonymous with the clause in the generative framework. It's where inflection like agreement, tense, aspect, etc. is located. As you say, this ...

Except you said 'agreement'. Nope... it says 'argument' Also, in a hypothetical SOV language (Mandarin has some SOV traits but I can't remember if this is possible - it certainly is in some langs though), you could have a sentence 'dog cat eat' where 'dog' is the topic and the object, or where 'dog...

But "three blind mice" is not the head of the clause. Infl is the head of the clause. Infl :?: Can you tell me that this mean? Please :) No. For a start, Mandarin has no verb agreement. Uh huh.... but it does assign arguments. Otherwise it would be terribly *ambiguous*. There are analyses that map ...

topic FINAL language? Aren't they very very rare? I don't know, I could be exagerating that. I chose it to be rare. The languages I know use a lot of topic-comment constructions, which of course are always put the topic first. I swapped it around, recalling these very "afterthought" topics situatio...

I don't really get what you mean about phrasal heads being like topics. Let's say in a noun phrase... the head is the topic of that phrase. "three blind mice"... mice is the topic of the (noun) phrase. "three blind mice bought seeing eye dogs"... three blind mice is the topic the entire phrase. Dos...

Hey all. Anyone here an expert in topic-prominent languages? Is there any interesting link between phrase heads and the topic of sentences? (perhaps how they behave... or how they're treated... or just any noteworthy similarity you've observed) While playing around with the noun phrase, I was hit wi...