Anyways, here is the SAE Grammar Test
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0
It's spelled "anticausative", but besides that, in Indo-European most intransitive verbs are NOT derived from the transitive. Haspelmath was specifically referring to what he calls "inchoative-causative alternations", like "boil", "melt", "get lost/lose", "rise/raise". The study Haspelmath refers to (which he himself carried out) compared only 31 such alternations. I happen to have access to the study, and the 31 pairs were:6. Anticausitive prominence: the intransitive verb is derived from the transitive. (e.g. The flame melts the ice -> The ice melts) [full marks for over 70% of intransitives derived from transitive; half marks for over 50%]
It's spelled éléphant, but besides that, it's just confusing. But this is not necessarily you guys' fault as it is of the Wikipedian who added this to the article on SAE. (EDIT: I have edited the Wikipedia article improving its wording.)10. Equative constructions based on an adverbial-relative clause structure. (e.g. French grand comme un élephant).
The English example is misleading: it's not clear, in English, if the transitive is derived from the intransitive or vice versa or neither - both intransitive and transitive alternants have the same form. Haspelmath is interested in pairs where the intransitive alternant is morphosyntactically marked in relation to the transitive: e.g. if you have transitive boil but intransitive ANTICAUS-boil. This contrasts with the more usual pattern outside Europe where you'd have something like intransitive boil and transitive CAUS-boil.Serafín wrote:I think question 6 could be worded much better:It's spelled "anticausative", but besides that, in Indo-European most intransitive verbs are NOT derived from the transitive. Haspelmath was specifically referring to what he calls "inchoative-causative alternations", like "boil", "melt", "get lost/lose", "rise/raise". The study Haspelmath refers to (which he himself carried out) compared only 31 such alternations.6. Anticausitive prominence: the intransitive verb is derived from the transitive. (e.g. The flame melts the ice -> The ice melts) [full marks for over 70% of intransitives derived from transitive; half marks for over 50%]
What would the meaning be if "Kinde" was in the genitive instead? Would it just be ungrammatical and have no meaning? This question goes for any language, not just German.7. External possessors in dative case. (e.g. German Die mutter wusch dem Kinde die Haare, lit. the mother washes the child the hair)
I don't know about German, but Spanish uses external possessors as indirect objects too: La madre le lava el pelo al niño. Using an internal possessor, la madre lava el pelo del niño, wouldn't be ungrammatical IMO, but it's not as common or idiomatic, and IMO it'd tend to imply a different meaning (namely that the child is not personally affected by the washing, perhaps because the hair is not attached to his head (say, maybe the mother had her child's hair cut and is now washing it for some purpose)).Soap wrote:What would the meaning be if "Kinde" was in the genitive instead? Would it just be ungrammatical and have no meaning? This question goes for any language, not just German.7. External possessors in dative case. (e.g. German Die mutter wusch dem Kinde die Haare, lit. the mother washes the child the hair)
mindHoskhMatriarch wrote:Nothing wrong with a phonology test, but there's way more to a language than that).
We can all be glad we have Hoskh around to share these breakthroughs with us.cromulant wrote:mindHoskhMatriarch wrote:Nothing wrong with a phonology test, but there's way more to a language than that).
blown
Look at the language names bro, those are obviously conlangs. You can spot em a mile away. Also check out the comments below the data, how "Pach'o is getting particles or something now." It is unusual for such comments to be made about natlangs.Qwynegold wrote:I don't understand how this document works. The data that's already there, is it from various conlangers who have added it themselves?
Celtic languages also have the adpositional verb prefixes (or had -- I'm not sure how productive they are anymore, and some of them no longer correspond to actual prepositions e.g. "di" and "cyf"), and I would guess that they are found in other IE branches as well. Celtic isn't considered part of SAE, though, so even that is enough to suggest that if anything it's an IE feature rather than SAE.k1234567890y wrote:I think there is actually at least one European grammatical feature that is not listed by them: the tendency to use "adposition+verb" compound verbs or phrasal verbs, Germanic languages, Slavic languages and Latin do all show such a way to create new verbs, although I am not sure the situations about Romance languages. In other languages, at least in Asian languages, "verb+verb" compound verbs seem to be more common.
I personally think the tendency to use "adposition+verb" compound verbs or "spatial adverb+verb" compound verbs can be listed as a SAE grammatical feature
WALS 23A is strictly about how the Patient is marked. Subject marking is irrelevant. So if your language ever marks objects with a preposition, it is dependent marking. (Cases and adpositions are treated equivalently in this chapter, unlike other WALS chapters.) If it ever marks the object on the verb, it is head marking. If it does both of these things, it's double marking. Neither = no marking, even if it has an otherwise rich case system that doesn't distinguish A and P, and marks the A on the verb.mèþru wrote:I'm confused by 54. After careful reading of the WALS link in the document (23A), I thought I finally understood it, but now I'm not sure again. If a verb agrees with the subject in number and person while case on nouns are not marked/marked with prepositions depending on the case (completely unmarked on the verb), is it dependent marking, double marking or both? English, French and Spanish all have this situation and are shown in WALS as being dependent marking, no marking and double marking, respectively, without any examples.
I don't know French. The Spanish preposition a used with human direct objects meets the "dependent marking" criterion, and don't Spanish object pronouns sometimes glom onto verbs? This may earn it "head marking" points as well.WALS 23A wrote:By removing the points most prone to follow universal tendencies, we can distill the morphosyntactic range down to two phrase types: possessive phrase with noun possessor (e.g. neighbor's house, the color of grass) and direct or primary object in the transitive clause (e.g. wrote books, broke a glass).