zompist bboard

UPDATE: Part 3 now available! See below:

Part 1/3:
Part 2/3:
Part 3/3:

On my blog... can't really be bothered to reformat here. As always, feedback welcome, etc.

There will be two more posts in the coming weeks: the next one will focus on more complex valence operations (reflexives, causatives, etc.), and the last one will deal with pragmatic / ideological uses of the valence/class agreement particles (as honorifics, insults, evidentials, etc.)

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I like these, do you mind if I use some parts of it?
I have also just noticed; how would you deal with tetravalents, etc.?

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næn:älʉː

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UPDATE: Part 2 is now available:

This deals with valence adjusting operations, including a number of causative constructions, and even applicatives and antipassives! (Passives are in there too - they just aren't all that interesting.) Comments and suggestions, again, welcome.

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Nice, very interesting! Rock on!

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

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Part 3 now available! See here:

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naw man don't give up
surely there's got to be some way to understand it ... I mean, it's a kind of animacy hierarchy controlling the valence here, and bumping people up or down the language's animacy scale based on social class is pretty easy to imagine a culture doing

EDIT: I think I remember one of Rosenfelder's languages has a feature where you can't have a lower-class nominative acting on a higher-class accusative ...
EDITT: it was and I wasn't really remembering it accurately. whatevs.

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<Anaxandridas> How many artists do you know get paid?
<Anaxandridas> Seriously, name five.

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Yeah but you're doing that to yourself
If you can learn noun systems with gender, or bantu style noun classes, or animacy hierarchies, and all the ways that these things interact with other bits in the language to create concords or syntactic fuckery or whatever, then you can learn the same idea when it concerns people
You've set up a Valve in your mind -- that's open to a chair being feminine or a verb being marked differently when its subject is a tree vs when it's an elephant -- but snaps shut when talking to the boss requires a different conjugation
Because it's not "that's a lot to remember"; it's "no I can't (won't) even process that".
Though perhaps it might help if you elaborated a little on the nature of the problem rather than simply making a Broccoli Face at the whole concept

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<Anaxandridas> How many artists do you know get paid?
<Anaxandridas> Seriously, name five.