zompist bboard

Would this be OK?: Māozia nakatu wūazi (SVO) Cat-ACT see-3SG dog-DIR The cat sees a dog. It's got the direct case coming after the verb, which you said in your last sentence couldn't happen. Yet the conditions for using the direct case are all there: the dog is "the X object of a transitive clause ...

So I was reading this analysis on Finnish grammar and it gave me an idea, the author basically argues that Finnish displays a split-alignment in the pronouns and normal nominals where the normal nominal system isn't nominative-accusative, rather, it simply assigns the 'nominative' case to the most p...

I once had a grammar of a conlang which lacked the capacity to establish identity. The conlang was entirely mereologically nihilistic. It did not in any way shape or form allowed someone to actually identify any object which included classes as object. You couldn't say 'the cat' or 'a cat' because e...

No one has it in conlangs by the way? Conlangs create an interesting perspective of how people solve the construct of signifying an ingredient used for it.

'to' does not really do 'à' enough justice, one of the things that makes omelette au fromage such an interesting construct is the plurality of uses à in French has. But hardly ever do glosses do justice to prepositions, because semantic distributions among languages' prepositions are often very rad...

Omelette au Fromage omelette[FEM] LOC_PREP DEF_ART[MSC] cheese[MSC] That's some very weird, largely untypical style of glossing. It is, I actually made it up because I didn't know a good way to capture à in gloss because: I'd say omelette[F] to_DEF.M.SG cheese[M] would be a far more normal/sensible...

For some reason I am trying to build the largest compendium of translations of "cheese omelette" in as many languages as possible together with a gloss and description of any unusual features in both natural languages and conlangs. If people could give descrptions of this in their conlangs or any la...

Oh yeah, the mighty excuse, they claim EXACTLY what I am claiming and I was pointed to those papers from the thread on reddit by people where I posited the exact theory I'm positing here and they're basically saying 'Yeah, check this out, this guy posits pretty much the same thing. Seriously, your a...

Yeah, I'd say the same thing once your final logical fallacy of argument by authority is finally overthrown. As I said, this idea that passive voices in English actually exhibit transitive qualities isn't new at all.

Oh by the way, I was just pointed towards this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2005.00076.x/abstract Haven't read it, but as the abstract indicates, it claims pretty much the same thing as I did and it also explicitly asserts that 'by' in the passive cannot be generated from ...

Dude, if you're too lazy to come with the argument yourself instead of ponting people into a super vague direction then at the very least be too lazy to type ad hominems. This is better than being too lazy to read a chapter in a fucking book. Seriously are you five? When people tell you your object...

You don't want to even try to comprehend the point various people here have been making about established textbook knowledge and shrug said textbook knowledge off as circular argumentation because you don't know what you're talking about and absolutely aren't willing to reconsider and correct your ...

Ah yes, ignoring half I say isn't enough, reject the silence and substitute personal insults this time.

What. Tehran, what you are doing is the following: you are saying that different morphosyntactic alignments are not a real thing because everything can be expressed in every language based on underlying roles. You were saying before that English also has an ergative/patient trigger because, hey, un...

Um, Tehran, you cannot argue one language with another language. The whole point of MSA is that there exists universal features that are realised differently ín different languages. You can't discuss English argument structure with Finnish examples unless your point is the above statement. No, you ...

Edit: you know what, scratch all this completely complicated nonsense, do you even read: Do you realize the difference between 'by car' and 'by a car' in a passive construction? Do you realize the difference between I was driven by car and I was driven by a car Do you realize that one is an adverbal...

No, English forbids like a lot of languages for the least overt argument to be dropped. Every sentence must have a subject. You just demonstrate that you cannot drop the subject. Something no one disagrees with. But you can drop the object. 'I see him' vs 'I see'. 'I breathe air' vs 'I breathe'. or...

Primarily your argument is a fucking waste of time anyway. MSA categories are nothing but convenient shorthands for expressing how a language realises the syntactic roles of NPs. The fact that you have discovered that these roles exist in every language doesn't change that it is demonstrable that u...

Even if that were the case (which I do not grant), you're still arguing about a hypothetical version of English which has lost its active voice. The English passive is nowhere near as common as the Hindi ergative construction. Well, I'm not, all I'm saying is that the passive in English is ambitran...

Ok here's my simplest question: Why do you keep saying Khariboli when billions of people know it as Hindi-Urdu ? Slight difference in meaning. Hindu-Urdu is a subset of the much larger Khariboli dialect continuum. My much simpler question of 'Why can't adpositional phrases supposedly not be core ve...

Ok here's my simplest question: Why do you keep saying Khariboli when billions of people know it as Hindi-Urdu ? Slight difference in meaning. Hindu-Urdu is a subset of the much larger Khariboli dialect continuum. My much simpler question of 'Why can't adpositional phrases supposedly not be core ve...

Ok here's my simplest question: Why do you keep saying Khariboli when billions of people know it as Hindi-Urdu ? Slight difference in meaning. Hindu-Urdu is a subset of the much larger Khariboli dialect continuum. My much simpler question of 'Why can't adpositional phrases supposedly not be core ve...

In English, prepositional phrases do not mark verbal arguments. If necessary, take that as axiomatic-- it's the only way that we can make sense of valence in English. If we did start counting prepositional phrases as arguments, we'd have to recognize sentences with valence of half a dozen, which is...

In your example 'I was taken by storm', 'by storm' is just as adverbial as 'a ton' in 'It snowed a ton'. Therefore, that argument is void. After all, try replacing 'storm' with other nouns. That's my argument?? I'm arguing that 'I'm taken by storm' and 'I'm taken by a storm' are morphologically dis...

By the way, another very strong argument why 'by' is a syntactic marker for a core verbal argument is that in an active sentence, it behaves grammatically differently. In an active voice you always use the singular without an article. Saying 'I go there by a car' sounds weird, the correct form is 'I...