obligatory plural marking and no distinction between plural and collective
I'm pretty sure you meant "no dictinction between
singular and collective". ...R-right? Latin wouldn't qualify presumably, because of the existence of certain
pluralia tantum that are basically collective nouns that only appear in plural-like forms (e.g.
arma 'weapons',
castra 'military camp'). But English, Spanish and French would qualify, since AFAIK there's no such nouns in these languages.
Spanish (S), French (F), Latin (L), my conlang Inilt (which is consciously quite European) (i)
S F L i
Green = yes (more specifically, the construction exists and is highly productive at least, even though it might not even be the most common option),
red = no,
blue = could be argued both ways,
purple = NO FUCKIN' IDEA.
Five points:
postnominal relative clauses with inflected, resumptive relative pronouns (e.g. English "who" vs. "whose")
S F L i
a periphrastic perfect formed with 'have' plus a passive participle (e.g. English "I have said")
S F L i
a preponderance of generalizing predicates to encode experiencers, i.e. experiencers appear as surface subjects in nominative case (e.g. English "I like music" instead of "Music pleases me")
S F L i
a passive construction formed with a passive participle plus an intransitive copula-like verb (e.g. English "I am known")
S F L i
dative external possessors (e.g. German "Die Mutter wusch dem Kind die Haare")
S F L i
verbal negation with a negative indefinite (e.g. English "Nobody listened")
S F L i
particle comparatives in comparisons of inequality (e.g. English "bigger than an elephant")
S F L i
equative constructions based on adverbial-relative clause structures (e.g. French "grand comme un élephant")
S F L i
subject person affixes as strict agreement markers, i.e. the verb is inflected for person and number of the subject, but subject pronouns may not be dropped even when this would be unambiguous
S F L i
differentiation between intensifiers and reflexive pronouns
S F L i
no distinction between alienable (e.g. legal property) and inalienable (e.g. body part) possession
S F L i
no distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns ("we and you" vs."we and not you")
S F L i
no productive usage of reduplication
S F L i
no marking of arguments other than the subject on the verb
S F L i
obligatory plural marking and no distinction between
singular and collective
S F L i
Two points:
definite and indefinite articles
S F L i
verb-initial order in yes/no questions
S F L i
comparative inflection of adjectives (e.g. English bigger)
S F L i
conjunction A, B and C
S F L i
suppletivism in second vs. two
S F L i
topic and focus expressed by intonation and word order, not particles or affixes
S F L i
only one gerund, preference for finite subordinate clauses
S F L i
specific "neither-nor" construction
S F L i
predominantly suffixing inflectional morphology
S F L i
nominative–accusative morphosyntactic alignment
S F L i
Spanish: 61-71%
French: 79-89%
Latin: 62-64%
My conlang Inilt: 62%
clawgrip wrote:Imralu wrote:definite and indefinite articles
What if you can use personal or indefinite pronouns as articles where necessary but they're not obligatory and rarely used? (For example, where
it house means "the house",
they house means "the houses" and
something house means "a house" but just
house can mean any of the above.) In European languages that have articles, they're generally obligatory, like plural marking. Would something like the above count?
probably means dedicated articles. "a" and "the" in English perform no function other than being articles. A pronoun doing double duty as an article probably shouldn't count.
I think it should. It'd be ridiculous to say that French
le, la, les don't count. (They
are pronouns doing double duty as articles afterall, e.g.
les is as much of an accusative plural pronoun as it is a plural definite article. On the other hand, French
un/du, une/de la, des, which are also numbers/a preposition followed by a pronoun, at least give some justification to consider article
le and article
un/du as being something Distinct...)
Imralu wrote:clawgrip wrote:Can you explain why exactly "who" and "whose" are considered resumptive? I don't quite follow.
Seconded. From what I know of most European languages, relative clauses are generally introduced by fronted, inflecting relative pronouns and resumptive pronouns (eg. "the girl that I saw her yesterday") are rare.
I think the only logical explanation is that "resumptive" here doesn't mean what it usually means.
KathAveara wrote:(WTF does "equative constructions based on adverbial-relative clause structures" mean? I don't know French, so I cannot understand the example)
I'm
very familiar with French and I've no idea what Haspelmath means by that either. Perhaps that such "equative comparisons" are made with a preposition that can also introduce an adverbial clause, thereby making the prepositional phrase a bit like a relative clause with an elided predicate? See for example "as big as an elephant" ~ "as big as an elephant
is big" (or in French,
grand comme un éléphant ~
grand comme l'est un éléphant). (EDIT: I just noticed this is basically what Imralu said.)