Morphosyntactic alignment

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The Unseen
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Post by The Unseen »

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, and S = P for others. So, morphosyntactically, the conlang (unnamed of now) distinguishes between A and P, S falling in line with either depending upon the verb. The distinction between A and P is determined by word order: The word order of a clause is always AVP, V being the verb.

There's a bit of a twist to all of this. Nouns in my conlang can be classified as either animate or inanimate. This is significant to morphosyntactic alignment because animate nouns are considered be inherently A and inanimate nouns are considered to be inherently P. Example:

Kó lene yarkhe
man wash knife
"The man is washing the knife"

In this sentence, animate noun is the agent (A), and inanimate noun yarkhe is the patient (P). This is not only apparent in word order, but from the fact that animate nouns are inherently agents and inanimate nouns are inherently patients. Now, this seems to be illogical: there are definitely instances where an animate noun is the patient, and there are obviously instances where an inanimate noun is the agent. This is where case marking comes in. If an animate noun is used as a patient, it receives the suffix -tl (or its allomorph -ll). Ex:

Tloso mállá kóll
God create-PERF man-CASE
"God created the man"

If an inanimate noun is used an agent, it takes the same suffix -tl/ll. Ex:

Yarkhetl voimá χintxa
knife-CASE cut-PERF bark
"The knife cut the bark"

Both of these suffixes can be used in one sentence if both nouns do not follow their inherent roles. Ex:

Yarkhetl voimá kóll
knife-CASE cut-PERF man-CASE
"The knife cut the man"

Recall that the conlang equates the subject (S) with either the agent or patient depending upon the verb. In the conlang, the verb phos - "to go" equates subject with agent, and the verb íkx - "to sneeze" equates subject with patient. Thus, the -tl suffix may be used with these intransitive verbs if nouns do not follow their inherent roles, like with transitive verbs. Examples:

Yarkhetl phosá
knife-CASE go-PERF
"The knife went"

Íkxá kóll
sneeze-PERF man-CASE
"The man sneezed"

I've been glossing the suffix as "CASE" as I don't know what to call it. Perhaps "inverse case"? The idea is akin to inverse number, whereby nouns have inherent numbers based on animacy, and a suffix is employed to denote that it has the opposite number (or one of the opposites). I don't want it to be confused with direct/inverse verb morphology, which is different, although I can see some parallels in terms of expected roles and what-not.

I haven't determined what I want to do in ditransitive clauses, but I should have that determined soon. Perhaps I think up something else interesting.
Last edited by The Unseen on Tue Aug 05, 2008 7:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by schwhatever »

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.
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Post by The Unseen »

schwhatever wrote: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 correct, but if intransitives are active-stative, isn't the entire language called active-stative? We may just be bantering around with terminology here, but is there a substantive difference that I'm missing? If it means anything, I'm not expecting that I've come upon a new type of alignment or anything - I'm pretty sure it's overall active-stative. It's just the case marking is different from anything I've heard of.

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Post by schwhatever »

The Unseen wrote:
schwhatever wrote: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 correct, but if intransitives are active-stative, isn't the entire language called active-stative? We may just be bantering around with terminology here, but is there a substantive difference that I'm missing? If it means anything, I'm not expecting that I've come upon a new type of alignment or anything - I'm pretty sure it's overall active-stative. It's just the case marking is different from anything I've heard of.
I really don't know. I was thinking that the active-stative distinction wouldn't carry over into the transitive (where it would be perceived as role reversal, not merely a subtext of meaning), but I've realized it's up to you. Does the marker not mark normally in transitive sentences when the alleged subject is more like a patient (or less like an agent, at the least)? Or does it mark syntactically like the patient?

Basically, what happens when you make an originally intransitive sentence transitive? There are a variety of responses, though, so I'm not sure what it would all mean...

There's an idea, have a language mark syntactically like an accusative language, but then take ergative or active-stative or phillipine inflectional morphemes. That's also called insanity. :mrgreen:
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Post by The Unseen »

schwhatever wrote:
The Unseen wrote:
schwhatever wrote: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 correct, but if intransitives are active-stative, isn't the entire language called active-stative? We may just be bantering around with terminology here, but is there a substantive difference that I'm missing? If it means anything, I'm not expecting that I've come upon a new type of alignment or anything - I'm pretty sure it's overall active-stative. It's just the case marking is different from anything I've heard of.
I really don't know. I was thinking that the active-stative distinction wouldn't carry over into the transitive (where it would be perceived as role reversal, not merely a subtext of meaning), but I've realized it's up to you. Does the marker not mark normally in transitive sentences when the alleged subject is more like a patient (or less like an agent, at the least)? Or does it mark syntactically like the patient?

Basically, what happens when you make an originally intransitive sentence transitive? There are a variety of responses, though, so I'm not sure what it would all mean...

There's an idea, have a language mark syntactically like an accusative language, but then take ergative or active-stative or phillipine inflectional morphemes. That's also called insanity. :mrgreen:
I haven't really thought it through, but at first blush I would say that the marker depends all on the animacy, and even if the subject is patient-like it would probably be treated as an agent. Actually, typing that out makes me think that that might not be the case for a few verbs (like the verb "undergo" in English), but perhaps I could make the system perfectly regular and make the subject of a transitive verb have to be an agent.

I'm guessing that when an intransitive sentence becomes transitive, the original S moves into the role that it equals (either A or P) and a new noun is introduced for the other role. I've actually thought of one example like this before:

Raχ llaeq
white tooth-PL
"The teeth are white"

Kó raχ llaeq
man white tooth-PL
"The man is whitening the teeth"

The verb raχ is a stative verb when used intransitively, as its S is treated like P. However, when it used transitively, the S actually becomes P, and a new A is introduced. The P doesn't gain the inverse marker here because it is staying in its inherent inanimate role of P. If I use an animate noun here, it would take the suffix in both cases, just as the inanimate doesn't take the suffix in both cases, because of role fulfillment. Ex:

Raχ kóll
white man-INV
"The man is white"

Kó raχ kóll
man white man-INV
"The man is whitening the man"

In these situations, intransitive becoming transitive is a causative construction. I don't have a causative morpheme here - the verb is contextually understood to be transitive, and I may think of a causative morpheme in the future, but for now I'm not using one.

In English, an intransitive becoming transitive via causation moves the S to P and introduces a new A. Ex: "I went" and "God made me go." In this conlang..............it's the same thing. I was wrong when I said the role for S would be kept the same as before. Because if I had an active intransitive verb like "to go," and I made it causative, the S would move to P anyways. Ex:

Nahe phosá
I go-PERF
"I went"

Tloso phosá nahetl
God go-PERF I-INV
"God made me go"

I don't think this is a sympton of accusativity, though. According to this paper (http://assets.cambridge.org/052166/0394 ... 4wsc00.pdf, pg. 21), it's "rather rare" for any language to use the original S as A in causation, and the example they give the new A is actually in a peripheral argument.

So I guess that answer was a bit long, but it terms of causation intransitive > transitive is fairly basic. The only other instance of intransitive > transitive I can think of is an ambitransitive. In this situation, S can equal P or A when the verb is optionally used without an object. In the same paper listed above, there's an example of an active-stative lang that has ambitransitivity go both ways depending on the verb (S equaling A or P). S = A when the P "is irrelevant or unimportant in the transitive," and S = O (they use O for P) when "describing a spontaneous process or event in the intransitive." I don't have examples for my conlang yet, and I may or may not use those types of ambitransitivity, but there's an example to go off of.

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Post by TomHChappell »

The Unseen wrote: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 alignment system with a split-ergative system with a split-S system.
Actually I think I'd call it "split-ergative", with the split being on the gender of the noun.
Animate nouns are nominative-accusative, and their word order is SV/AVP. (Or is it AV/VP/AVP?)
Inanimate nouns are absolutive-ergative, and their word order is VS/AVP. (Or is it AV/VP/AVP?)
Animate Agents and SAs, and inanimate Patients and SPs, are unmarked.
Animate Patients and SPs are marked Accusative.
Inanimate Agents and SAs are marked Ergative.
It just happens that the Accusative mark for Animates and the Ergative mark for Inanimates happen to look and sound the same (be homophonous).

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Post by The Unseen »

TomHChappell wrote:
The Unseen wrote: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 alignment system with a split-ergative system with a split-S system.
Actually I think I'd call it "split-ergative", with the split being on the gender of the noun.
Animate nouns are nominative-accusative, and their word order is SV/AVP. (Or is it AV/VP/AVP?)
Inanimate nouns are absolutive-ergative, and their word order is VS/AVP. (Or is it AV/VP/AVP?)
Animate Agents and SAs, and inanimate Patients and SPs, are unmarked.
Animate Patients and SPs are marked Accusative.
Inanimate Agents and SAs are marked Ergative.
It just happens that the Accusative mark for Animates and the Ergative mark for Inanimates happen to look and sound the same (be homophonous).
Interesting...never thought of it that way before.

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Post by The Unseen »

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 inanimate nouns have inherent/unmarked roles in ditransitive clauses like they do in transitive and intransitive clauses. First off, the subject of a ditransitive is treated like A, so that would mean an animate subject of a ditransitive clause would be unmarked and an inanimate subject would take the suffix tl/ll. To the new stuff:

The other two arguments are called (according to this thread) recipient R and theme T. In the conlang (still unnamed), animate nouns are inherently R and inanimate nouns are inherently T. This makes sense, because animate things much more often receive, and they tend to receive inanimate things. But like the A/P distinction, this is not always the case. When the reverse is true for either noun, the suffix -ra is added, tentatively called the "oblique case." Examples:

Nahe qhá leye éphi
I give-PERF she drink
"I gave her a drink"
(animate leye unmarked b/c in inherent R, inanimate éphi unmarked b/c in inherent T)

Nahe qhá leye ikoánara
I give-PERF she iguana-OBL
"I gave her an iguana"
(animate ikoána marked b/c in "unnatural" T)

Nahe qhá éphira rívi teth
I give-PERF drink-OBL alcohol more
"I gave the drink more alcohol"
(inanimate éphi marked b/c in "unnatural R)

The oblique has two other uses aside from core arguments R and T: as an instrumental and as a genitive. In these examples, the instrumental and the genitive are treated like R. Therefore, animate instrumental and genitive nouns are unmarked, whereas inanimate instrumental and genitive nouns get the suffix. Note: I may or may not use the genitive. Also, there could be an argument for these usages being treated like T instead of R, but I haven't thought of one yet. My argument for R is from looking at a ditransitive clause: "I gave her a drink" could imply that the act of giving was via the use of "her": the action used "her" as an instrument. And for natlang example's sake, IIRC one of the many uses of the dative case in Classical Greek is instrumental. That may not have to do with semantics and instead some other sort of case consolidation, but I'd think it would be the former.

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Post by TomHChappell »

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 "dative" are those that mark something necessary to the event described by the clause, that neither control it nor are affected by it; and instruments usually fall into that category. So he would agree with your using the same case for "dative" and "instrumental", I think. (If "a drink" is an instrument in the above clause, though, it is affected; it is moved (at least metaphorically) and probably consumed. So I could be wrong.)

Ordinarily, if the "dative" and the "genitive" are alike, they're locative; a Recipient is like a human (or animate) goal, so dative=allative; and a Possessor is like a human (or animate) location, so genitive=locative.

(And of course "genitive" and "dative" are semantically related; once I've given something to somebody, it's now theirs.) So there's good precedent for "dative" and "genitive" to be "the same case".

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Post by The Unseen »

TomHChappell wrote: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 "dative" are those that mark something necessary to the event described by the clause, that neither control it nor are affected by it; and instruments usually fall into that category. So he would agree with your using the same case for "dative" and "instrumental", I think. (If "a drink" is an instrument in the above clause, though, it is affected; it is moved (at least metaphorically) and probably consumed. So I could be wrong.)

Ordinarily, if the "dative" and the "genitive" are alike, they're locative; a Recipient is like a human (or animate) goal, so dative=allative; and a Possessor is like a human (or animate) location, so genitive=locative.

(And of course "genitive" and "dative" are semantically related; once I've given something to somebody, it's now theirs.) So there's good precedent for "dative" and "genitive" to be "the same case".
Thanks for the info.

The idea for combining the dative and instrumental use with the genitive is partially because I imagine the oblique case being a catch-all case that historically absorbed the uses of other cases, thus the name. This case then analogously formed the same unmarked-by-animacy distinction for ditransitive arguments that the 'inverse case' did for the other roles. So I guess the choice whether the instrumental and genitive are considered like R or T may have to be historically based, depending on -ra's former, more specific usage.

I agree with your first sentence about how the instrumental could be T. Something else I realized is that if the unmarked form delineates typical roles, wouldn't the instrumental case then be unmarked for inanimates, because inanimates are much more often used as instruments than animates? Also, instrument=T may make something like compounds more logical: if there is a verbal noun "killing," "spear-killing" would mean that the spear has some sort of adjectival or adverbial property in relation to the killing, and in my conlang adjectives and adverbs are unmarked. Also deux, it could help distinguish monotransitive verbs with instrumental arguments from ditransitive verbs: the second, inanimate noun in the sentence would be unmarked if it was a monotransitive with instrumental and would be marked (-ra) if it was a ditransitive. The verbs are lexically distingished anyways, but there may be a homonymous situation I can't think of right now. Again, historical development may have to be taken into account here, something I have not yet developed. There's also a situation where the instrumental doesn't follow the unmarked-or-marked thing and is instead always marked. The genitive may do the same thing, or may stick with the alteration. Maybe even the genitive can mark between alienable and inalienable possession by whether it is considered like R or T? I've always liked the alienable/inalienable distinction, so I'm just throwing the idea out there. Again, it's something I have to think through.

One question: when you say that if the dative and genitive are locative if they're alike, does that mean that the case can or should also act as a locative?

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Post by TomHChappell »

The Unseen wrote: .... First off, the subject of a ditransitive is treated like A, so that would mean an animate subject of a ditransitive clause would be unmarked and an inanimate subject would take the suffix tl/ll. .... The other two arguments are called (according to this thread) recipient R and theme T. In the conlang (still unnamed), animate nouns are inherently R and inanimate nouns are inherently T. This makes sense, because animate things much more often receive, and they tend to receive inanimate things. But like the A/P distinction, this is not always the case. When the reverse is true for either noun, the suffix -ra is added, tentatively called the "oblique case." Examples:

Nahe qhá leye éphi
I give-PERF she drink
"I gave her a drink"
(animate leye unmarked b/c in inherent R, inanimate éphi unmarked b/c in inherent T)

Nahe qhá leye ikoánara
I give-PERF she iguana-OBL
"I gave her an iguana"
(animate ikoána marked b/c in "unnatural" T)

Nahe qhá éphira rívi teth
I give-PERF drink-OBL alcohol more
"I gave the drink more alcohol"
(inanimate éphi marked b/c in "unnatural R)

....
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"?

I'm not going to reply to most of your very interesting post.
But one thing I will do is answer your question:
The Unseen wrote:One question: when you say that if the dative and genitive are locative if they're alike, does that mean that the case can or should also act as a locative?
I only meant that frequently dative=allative, and frequently genitive=locative, and frequently dative=genitive, and frequently allative=locative.

A language can have any one of those homophonies without having any of the others; and it can also have several combinations of two or three of them without having all of them.

English "to" is an example of dative=allative. (but genitive != locative in English, and neither genitive nor locative is the same as dative/allative.)

There are also languages where dative=allative=genitive; to say "I have two cars" you say something that more literally sounds like "There are two cars to me".

If instead you said "There are two cars at me", this would be genitive=locative.

--------------------------------------------

Also,
The Unseen wrote:Something else I realized is that if the unmarked form delineates typical roles, wouldn't the instrumental case then be unmarked for inanimates, because inanimates are much more often used as instruments than animates?
"Causees" -- "agents of effect" -- are semantically a lot like "animate instruments".
That doesn't contradict your remark that instruments are usually inanimate (or that animates usually aren't instruments).
I just thought it would interest you.

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Post by The Unseen »

TomHChappell wrote: 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 that. Ditransitives are in the order AVRT.
"Causees" -- "agents of effect" -- are semantically a lot like "animate instruments".
That doesn't contradict your remark that instruments are usually inanimate (or that animates usually aren't instruments).
I just thought it would interest you.
Yeah, that's interesting...perhaps another twist to add...

I think I've decided what I want to do in regards to the instrumental and genitive, but I don't want to bog the thread with it as it is about morphosyntactic alignment and not my conlang's case system. Both of you (schwhatever and TomHChappell) have been a great help.

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Post by Sander »

I can't believe this thread is still alive :)
I've been browsing the board again lately and it's itching... I'll probably pick up conlanging again sometime soon. I think I'll flesh out Reçaneið ["4EtS.ni:], a daughter language of Lembrin.

Just wanted to say that this:
The Unseen wrote:[...]In the conlang (still unnamed), animate nouns are inherently R and inanimate nouns are inherently T. This makes sense, because animate things much more often receive, and they tend to receive inanimate things. [...]
... is really cool. Very clever idea, and it doesn't seem contrived either because it makes perfect sense, as you said. I like it!
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[b][url=http://benanne.net/misc/com.pdf]λemvrin eiδerial[/url][/b] (pdf)
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Re: Morphosyntactic alignment

Post by Parahq »

Sander wrote: [*]Some other languages exhibit even weirder alignments, like an animacy hierarchy (aka direct/inverse system). I'm not sure about this, but I think I even read about a language which groups A with P and marks S differently. Which is pretty damn crazy.[/list]
I'm interested in using that one. By that do you mean it doesn't differentiate between A and P, and could you or someone make up a sentence in English (first one in that weird alignment - with "A", "P", "VERB" and those pointers, added in brackets), and right below it the sentence repeated the way it would be said in regular English..

Lets say "Jason killed a bird" and "the dog gave the dead bird to Troy".
In a fair-and-square fight, an unarmed human being is no match for a kogg yalc! Even the most accomplished martial artists will have a lot of difficulty inflicting any significant damage to one.. You don't wanna mess with these Mofos!

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Re: Morphosyntactic alignment

Post by TomHChappell »

Parahq wrote:
Sander wrote:I think I even read about a language which groups A with P and marks S differently. Which is pretty damn crazy.
I'm interested in using that one. By that do you mean it doesn't differentiate between A and P
Look up "monster raving loony" and "monster raving loony".
Wikipedia wrote:Certain Iranian languages, such as Rushani, distinguish only transitivity, using a transitive case, for both A and O, and an intransitive case.
Very little on-line doesn't just refer to the Wikipedia, eventually, for examples of an actual "monster raving loony" language.

-------------------
[EDIT]: You might want to look at this or this or this.

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Post by Parahq »

Thanks. I never heard of that "monster raving loony" term before.
In a fair-and-square fight, an unarmed human being is no match for a kogg yalc! Even the most accomplished martial artists will have a lot of difficulty inflicting any significant damage to one.. You don't wanna mess with these Mofos!

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Post by Salmoneus »

It was invented by conlangers.
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Post by TomHChappell »

Salmoneus wrote:It was invented by conlangers.
That is, the term "monster raving loony" was invented by a conlanger and adopted by other conlangers. The alignment wasn't discovered by conlangers, but by professional linguists; and it occurs in a few natlangs. I have not been able to find a better term coined by and used by professional linguists for this alignment; as one of the other responders noted, his/her teacher merely told him/her (incorrectly) that no such natlang exists.

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Post by jmcd »

Screaming Lord Sutch was a conlanger?

Is it possible to have no morphosyntactic alignment:
Either using word or morpheme order all the time:

sleep he

hit he she

give he she book

thus noone could tell whether the 'he' in "sleep he" is the same as the 'he' or the 'she' in "hit he her"

Or having each different function marked differently:

sleep he-Subject case

hit he-Agent case she-Patient case

give he-Agent case she-Receiver case book-Theme case

?

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Post by TomHChappell »

jmcd wrote:Screaming Lord Sutch was a conlanger?
I realized my mistake between the last time I signed on and reading jmcd's post.
What I should have written was "the term 'monster raving loony' was first applied to this morphosyntactic alignment by a conlanger".

OTOH FAIK Screaming Lord Sutch actually is a conlanger.

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dhok
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Post by dhok »

Dhokro-Kohanian languages are all pure NOM-ACC, except for the almost dead Northern branch which has ergativity in subordinate clauses.
Quazio-Charren languages are almost pure ERG-ABS (participles are whacked up).
Macro-Miqobian languages are tripartite.
Micro-Miqobian languages have ergative case marking, but nominative verb agreement.

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Miekko
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Post by Miekko »

jmcd wrote:
Is it possible to have no morphosyntactic alignment:
Either using word or morpheme order all the time:

sleep he

hit he she

give he she book

thus noone could tell whether the 'he' in "sleep he" is the same as the 'he' or the 'she' in "hit he her"
morphosyntactic alignment does not require visible marking - if word or morpheme order serves to clear it up, morphosyntactic alignment already exists.

also, strictly speaking, this doesn't have a lot to do with figuring out how anaphora refer either.
< Cev> My people we use cars. I come from a very proud car culture-- every part of the car is used, nothing goes to waste. When my people first saw the car, generations ago, we called it šuŋka wakaŋ-- meaning "automated mobile".

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Post by jmcd »

But in my example there was no showing of if A was grouped with S or if P was grouped with S or if S was a different category from both. Does this still count as morphosyntactic alignment if I only show the distinction between the relevant theta roles but don't show whether the theta roles are connected somehow?

I'm not entirely sure what anaphora has to do with it. Perhaps that's how to tell if they are connected or not?

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Post by rickardspaghetti »

What do you call a language that groups patient, reciever and theme into separate cases each?
そうだ。死んでいる人も勃起することが出来る。
俺はその証だ。

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dhok
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Post by dhok »

Elkaril 2.0?

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