zompist bboard

NakedCelt, ils: Bomb war crimes courts! Gas all librulz for treason! Use Muslims for stem cell experiments! Kill them all! Kill them all! Genuinely funny piece. (Sorry, Dew and Gremlins, if laughing at the NRO cruise offends you, but I think it's pretty humorous.) Oh no, I love laughing at right-wi...

I was wondering: are the types of serial verbs seen in creoles/West African languages like Sranan/Akan represented in any way in polysynthetic languages? To a certain extent. Many meanings expressed by serial verbs in such languages tend to be expressed by morphology in polysynthetic languages: for...

I've found the article about the typology on wikipedia but it does not include the construct state in its description of his typology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milewski's_typology

Is this an omission from the wiki, or was the typology later revised?

A different extension of alignment typology was made by Tadeusz Milewski. He asked how "genitive phrases" might be aligned with intransitive and/or monotransitive sentences. Has anyone on the board looked into this? Let me abbreviate the semantic roles this way: In a monovalent clause, the only par...

Funnily enough, I was just thinking about learning to cook more recently. I've grown a bit tired of preprocessed food, and over the last few weeks I've gone through my limited number of from-scratch recipes enough times to be sick of them. I've been thinking of buying a "Cooking for Retards" book or...

As for Focus; There seems to be a difference between "emphatic" focus and "empathic" focus. "Emphatic" focus seems to refer to "what the speaker thinks is the most important part of what he/she is saying". "Empathic" focus seems to refer to "the participant from whose point-of-view the event is bei...

An article I read not long ago (and I'm sorry I don't have a good bibliographical reference for you) said most languages could be grouped into three groups according to their usual way of handling verbs of motion. The two biggest groups are the ones you mentioned; * manner is part of the verb but p...

I was interested in the question "are reciprocal and reflexive persons or voices?" As I understand it, they count as voices when applied to verbs, but as persons when applied to pronouns. I dislike the confusion about what is actually a voice. It seems to me that voice, depending on the linguistic,...

ngwaalq is ergative, if you only look at the case particles. However, it has a topic overlay system (ie, the topic particle replaces the case particle generally), and the topic marker tends to associate most often with the subject (A/S).

No I was saying i thought serial verbs in general had to be just be chains of verbs with no intervening morphemes. I wasn't saying that was the only defining feature of them [of course ther are more cosntraints like the TAM etc]. If you'd read what I typed in, you'd see that by most definitions (ou...

Here's a partly helpful explanation: THE PAPUAN LANGUAGES OF NEW GUINEA CLAUSE CHAINING In this section I turn to what is probably the most distinctive feature of Papuan languages in general and, further, their most alien feature to speakers of the languages of Europe. The discourse of most Papuan l...

The "panting" is a subordinate adverbial clause (save for the elision of a preposition like "while" or other standard adverbial clause trappings) - whereas clause chaining involves independent clauses that are mooshed together more tightly than coordinate clauses and typically lack TAM marking on a...

Tons of examples later, either this evening or over the weekend.

A marginal example can be found in English by forming chains with -ing verbs, eg: panting, the man ran down the beach the final clause "the man ran down the beach" is complete in and of itself, but *panting is not a valid clause in English. In English, though, this is a minor sentence type, whereas ...

DESCRIBING MORPHOSYNTAX CLAUSE CHAINING Since the mid-1960s there have been many studies dealing with clause chaining languages. THe paradigm example of clause-chaining languages occur in the highlands of New Guinea, both Irian Java and Papua New Guinea, though clause chaining is a well recognised p...

Well, I was chatting about Serial Verbs and Clause Chaining on IRC and Nuntar requested more information, so here's my attempt to pull some stuff together from what I had close to hand. DESCRIBING MORPHOSYNTAX SERIAL VERBS A serial verb construction contains two or more verb roots that are neither c...

With JohnQPublik's permission, you can now find all the lessons he wrote here (on one page with a neat little table of contents) at: http://www.chrisdb.me.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=cognitive_linguistics At the end of Lesson 9, I'm pretty sure "IE" refers to "Indo-European", not "Internet Explorer" as the...

With JohnQPublik's permission, you can now find all the lessons he wrote here (on one page with a neat little table of contents) at:

http://www.chrisdb.me.uk/wiki/doku.php? ... inguistics

-Klaivas- wrote:

Lingophile wrote:Try purring like a cat or imitate the sound of a revving engine.

I've read that so many times.

Is it just me who ends up doing a bilabial trill when trying to do cat sounds?

For some reason I can do uvular trills easier than I can do alveolar trills, which I find takes more effort to do than them. However, this might have something to do with my already having uvular approximants as my main "r" sound, with postalveolar approximants only showing up in purely prevocalic ...

Also, for people knowledgeable about Basque, how does Trask figure that etxeko is derived from etxean and not just etxe ? Are there examples elsewhere of morphophonemic changes that would take *etxeanko to etxeko ? I don't know about the sound changes, but perhaps part of the argument is to do with...

This is all interesting... I guess the problem I have with it as a conlanger is that most of the examples so far have been in English. It would helpful if we could have some detailed examples from other natural languages as well. For instance, if TIME IS A FINITE RESOURCE (IIRC) is an English metaph...

Incidentally, googling produced:

http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/MetaphorHome.html
http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/metaphors/

which seems to be a list of some metaphors (from English?). I don't know if anyone's already linked to it or not...

Sand and water are clearly singulars in English: we are sure that sand is , and so is water. In a language like Russian, the adjective too would have singular agreement. My point was that languages which mark plurality compulsarily in general often make different choices regarding the singularity v...