Guitarplayer wrote:In a causative clause, is the agent-of-effect marked as if it's an instrument?
Care to explain agent-of-effect?
Agents control and/or perform and/or effect and/or instigate the action the clause describes.
In causative clauses the "agent" role is split; there are typically two agents, an instigator and a performer.
If A makes B do C to D, A is the initial instigator and B is the final performer. Both of them may exercise more or less control and may more or less effect the action.
The "initial instigator" or "causer" or "agent-of-cause" is A.
The "final performer" or "causee" or "agent-of-effect" is B.
Guitarplayer wrote:Hm, I've not done comparative research
I don't mean to embarass you; I haven't done any research either. I'd just be curious to know the answer.
Guitarplayer wrote:If you mean the "The book is for him" example, I marked that with an asterisk anyway. I'd still, however, mark "the book" as an agent, but I can see how that is basically the same thing as the theme in ditransitive clauses. On the other hand, why can't it be a little illogical in places? This is in analogy with other predicative clauses rather than with ditransitive clauses.
A perfectly acceptable explanation.
Guitarplayer wrote:Have you explained your glossing abbreviations yet?
Yes. It's right after the overview of tables and illustrations, on page 5 of the file (the page in print is unnumbered).
Oops!
I missed it. Yes, it's there, and good.
Guitarplayer wrote:I am used to refer to any process that derives a noun from another part of speech as "nominalization". Whether that's deverbal, deadjectival, or de-whateveral. Those I'd handle as subclasses of nominalization if it's worth to point out differences.
That makes sense. My question was, "what did
you mean by
denominalization?". Let us know your thoughts when you want to.
Guitarplayer wrote:TomHChappell wrote:In 6.1 about compounds, can you derive each some word of each part-of-speech from a compound of two words of each part-of-speech?
TBH, I didn't find examples for all 49 combinations of word+word. Like,
marinsoyang, lit. 'in-front-or'. Great, what use would that be?! Do I explicitly have to mention which combinations don't appear? Also, this is a conlang, so its lexicon is still growing, so I don't know what I'll be doing in 1..5..10 years, should I still be working actively working on this then. Of course, this doesn't mean I can't go back and revise things.
No, I don't think you should explicitly mention which ones don't occur. But I would like you to mention (and provide examples) of those that
do occur.
OK, let me do some thinking and just type my thoughts here; I hope it'll be a bit better organized than "stream-of-consciousness", but I apologize if it isn't.
When I was in school most Americans were taught that English has eight word-classes (parts-of-speech); to wit and namely, in (nearly) alphabetical order,
- adjectives,
- adpositions,
- adverbs,
- conjunctions,
- nouns,
- pronouns,
- verbs,
- and interjections.
I'll leave interjections out of consideration altogether.
There are then 21 possible types of source-pairs (disregarding order);
- adjective+adjective
- adjective+adposition
- adjective+adverb
- adjective+conjunction
- adjective+noun
- adjective+pronoun
- adjective+verb
- adposition+adposition
- adposition+adverb
- adposition+conjunction
- adposition+noun
- adposition+pronoun
- adposition+verb
- adverb+adverb
- adverb+conjunction
- adverb+noun
- adverb+pronoun
- adverb+verb
- conjunction+conjunction
- conjunction+noun
- conjunction+pronoun
- conjunction+verb
- noun+noun
- noun+pronoun
- noun+verb
- pronoun+pronoun
- pronoun+verb
- verb+verb
I think "into" and "onto" could be English adpositions that are formed by combining two adpositions.
What part-of-speech are Spanish's "conmigo" and "contigo"? Could they be considered adposition+pronoun compounds?
English has lots of verb+adposition "two-part" verbs, pretty much equivalent to German's "separable" verbs. But "income" is a noun that's an adposition+verb combination.
Isn't it possible and reasonable and plausible to consider English's "and/or" to be a conjunction that's a compound of two conjunctions?
English occasionally has objects or patients incorporated into verbs; it also sometimes has subjects or agents incorporated into verbs.
There's a pidgin of English that has the inclusive 1st+2nd person dual pronoun "yumi" and the 1st+2nd person inclusive trial pronoun "yumitripela". I think "yumi" is a compound of "yu" and "mi".
Some people might say "gimme" and "I'd've" and so on are verb+pronoun or pronoun+verb compounds in English; but maybe not.
Possibly not all of those pairs would reasonably occur in a given language.
Possibly some could occur but the resulting compound could only be one part-of-speech; that's likely to be true of, for instance:
adposition+adposition --> adposition
conjunction+conjunction --> conjunction
pronoun+pronoun --> pronoun
Endocentric compounds, dvandvas, and appositional compounds, are likely to be the same part-of-speech as the head constituent. But exocentric compounds such as bahuvrihis might not be.
But there's a French verb, "tutoyer", derived from a pronoun+pronoun compound. And English has a noun, "voirdire", derived from a French verb+verb compound. So I'm not certain I can say for sure that if two words of a given class are compounded, the resulting compound word must be of the same class.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_% ... _compounds mentions nouns like "corkscrew" that are compounded of a verb and a noun.
Guitarplayer wrote:As for Pāṇini's types of compounds, I made up at least one dvandva (tihandekey, 'cutlery' < tihang 'knife' + dekey 'fork', however for some reason this hasn't ended up in the dictionary, or got lost by transferring between an online and an offline copy of my dictionary database both ways) and one or two bahuvrihis (that I don't remember anymore).
I'd like to see them if you can find or remember or re-create them.
Guitarplayer wrote:Strictly speaking, though, the dvandva is not a pure one, as that would require both words to be in the dual (AFAIK), which my conlang doesn't have.
I thought a dvandva was just any two-headed compound noun; that is, you combine two nouns, and either one of them is just as much the head of the compound as the other. I never heard that it had anything to do with the dual grammatical number.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvandva. It looks like the dvandva ordinarily lacks a singular (except for samāhāra-type dvandva which are collective nouns), but in Sanskrit it can have both a dual and a plural. The English example given, "singer-songwriter", is not a samāhāra because it isn't collective, and is not an ekaśeşa because neither source-noun is mostly omitted, but it's not an itaretara either because the singer and the songwriter are the same person so it's singular instead of dual or plural. I'd say "singer-songwriter" is a dvandva to the extent that it's a compound at all; both "singer" and "songwriter" are heads together of this compound, (if it's a compound), and that's what makes it a dvandva. However,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_% ... sification calls "actor-director" and "maidservant" appositional compounds rather than dvandvas. "Bittersweet" (adj+adj=adj) and "sleepwalk" (verb+verb=verb) are probably better English dvandvas.
What about tatpuruṣa or endocentric compounds? "Housewife", "doghouse", "blackbird", etc.?
Guitarplayer wrote:Does every combination of a case and a preposition have a meaning? Will there be a table somewhere that will say what those are? Do some of them also depend on the focus-marker for their specific meaning? Can you use a preposition and a postposition both at the same time on the same object noun-phrase as long as it's in locative case?
This requires further investigation. However, I, too, think that too much
"cartesianness" in conlangs (as exemplified and criticized by Miekko) is a pitfall that should be avoided. And that I'm probably not unguilty of.
OK.
Guitarplayer wrote:me wrote:Can you express all 30 of Fillmore's "The Case for Case" roles in Ayeri via some combination of Ayeri cases, prepositions, postpositions, and focus-markers?
However, this part of my question is not really about "Cartesianness"; it's about expressive ability. I'm sure that if your conlang is complete, or once it is complete, you can expressd all 30 of Fillmore's whatever-those-things-were (
thematic relations, perhaps?); my question is, do you intend to be able to do them all by combining cases, prepositions, postpositions, and focus-markers? And if so, can you do them all yet?
I wasn't really interested in whether or not every such combination has a meaning ("cartesianness"); but, rather, in how you expressed each of those meanings, whether via an appropriate combination or otherwise.
Guitarplayer wrote:4.4.2 how about fractions? "half, one-and-a-half, one-third, one-less-a-third, one-and-a-third, quarter, one-less-a-quarter, one-and-a-quarter, etc.".
As for the
other question about
integer ± fraction, I sketched out mathematical terminology before. I think it would indeed be worthy to add what I've worked out so far.
I guess I missed your mathematical terminology. If I don't find it by looking again, can you point me to it?
Latin has all kinds of "sesqui-" numerical prefixes. "Sesqui-" comes from "semis+que" where "que" is the enclitic form of Latin's conjunction meaning "and". "Sesqui-" by itself means one-and-a-half; "sequidi-" means two-and-a-half; "sesquitri-" means three-and-a-half; and so on.
Ancient Egyptian had a special fraction for two-thirds, that wasn't just adding up unit fractions.
Guitarplayer wrote:me wrote:You have multiplicative numbers like twice and thrice etc.; can you also have numbers that multiply by a fraction?
I don't see how the last question is practical (how often do you say "three-quarter-times"?). It would be fun to figure out, though.
In English we often multiply by one-and-a-half; "half again" is a common phrase. Maybe I'm wrong but I think we also often multiply by two-thirds. And we decimate (we learned how from the Romans' Latin); that's basically multiplying by nine-tenths.
If you have words for:
unit fraction
one minus a unit fraction
one plus a unit fraction
you may, or may not, have words related to those terms the way "once" is related to "one", "twice" is related to "two", and "thrice" is related to "three".
You might also have a series of words for
integer plus a half
and you may have some words for multiplying by those.
But in general I expect
integer plus unit fraction
integer minus unit fraction
integer times unit fraction
to be phrases rather than words, except in special cases (at the outside, when the integer and the denominator are both less than or equal to your base; though maybe in some cases you'll allow the unit fraction's denominator to be some power of your base).
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Looking forward to whatever comes next!