Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random Thread]

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Imralu »

If the lexicon is completely consistent (unlike English's zero derivation) it only makes sense to regard each word as one morpheme. Otherwise you'd instantly be doubling the size of your dictionary to account for the verb and noun meanings of each word. That would make sense for languages with extensive zero derivation and an inconsistent link between the verbal and nominal meanings (eg. English, or, more extensively, Polynesian languages), but if you're only ever adding "to be" and "that which..." /"-er" to the meanings (with the occasional translation kink), there's no point because your dictionary will end up like this.

bla (n) dog
bla (v) to be a dog

ble (n) eater, consumer, that which consumes
ble (v) to eat, to consume, to be an eater

bli (n) small thing, small person
bli (v) to be small

blo (n) I, me
blo (v) to be me

blu (n) sleeper, that which sleeps
blu (v) to sleep

bly (n) house
bly (v) to be a house
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by jal »

Imralu wrote:If the lexicon is completely consistent (unlike English's zero derivation) it only makes sense to regard each word as one morpheme.
On the other hand, the dictionary will then look like this:

bla (n) dog; (v) to be a dog
ble (n) eater, consumer, that which consumes; (v) to eat, to consume, to be an eater
bli (n) small thing, small person; (v) to be small
blo (n) I, me; (v) to be me
blu (n) sleeper, that which sleeps; (v) to sleep
bly (n) house; (v) to be a house

Since due to the nature of relations between objects and actions, there can never be a fully regular derivation between them (not to mention that it being a language, and assuming it's speakers are human or have a human-like mind, there will be figures of speech, semantic drift and so on and so forth).


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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Imralu »

Yes, I'm aware that's how a dictionary would show it, but I thought I'd emphasise that this is relating them as separate lexemes. It's still completely redundant to give the noun and verb meanings for every lexeme if the relation between them is consistent.
jal wrote:Since due to the nature of relations between objects and actions, there can never be a fully regular derivation between them
Yes there can.

[VERB] = "to be [NOUN]"
=
[NOUN] = "entity which [VERB]s“

Every noun is also itself with a copula and every verb is also its agent noun. Something that does a verb is the agent noun of that verb and to do a verb is to be the agent noun.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Post by din »

Zju wrote:
zompist wrote:Just as another test case, is "forget-me-not" a noun? My dictionary thinks so (and I agree). Is it "really" an imperative VP?
Not really an argument in the discussion, but that example reminded me of the dozen-or-so nouns in Bulgarian formed out of imperative + object, e.g.:

...

препъникамък
trip_over-2.SG.IMP-stone
tricky obstacle

Any other languages with such or similar feature?
And yes, the last one does literally translate to 'trip a stone (over sth.)!' instead of 'trip over a stone!'
In Dutch, this is 'struikelblok', which you could analyze similarly (trip.2SG-block), though instead of a stone, the culprit is a block (much like English 'stumbling block'). Our imperative is the same as the 2SG present indicative conjugation, by the way.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by malloc »

To illustrate my dilemma, imagine you wanted to translate the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" into a language based on the principles I am describing. Notice the nagging repetition and long-winded quality that comes from every word ending in the same few grammatically significant syllables.

Tasakoti mokakoti valupikoti salatasati ammakosa kanikosa.
tasa-ko-ti moka-ko-ti valupi-ko-ti salata-sa-ti amma-ko-sa kani-ko-sa
fast-ATT-3S brown-ATT-3S fox-ATT-3S jump.over-4O-3S lazy-ATT-4S dog-ATT-4S
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

ATT - The previously described attributive or nominal form
S - Subject pronominal suffix
O - Object pronominal suffix
4 - Fourth person, obviative


----

For those confused about why I would bother eliminating the noun-verb distinction for roots that are "obviously" nominal or verbal, imagine the following forms:

fast-3S = "She is quick"
dog-3S = "That is a dog"
lazy-NEG-1S = "I am not lazy"
work-ATT-3S = "worker"
capture-PASS-ATT-3S = "prisoner"

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Soap »

Would it make sense to put the suffixes only on one of the words in each phrase, since they can be assumed to agree with each other? "Quickbrownfox" etc
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Frislander »

I myself wouldn't say that Kelen counts as "minimising" the noun-verb distinction, since aside from the relationals there's nothing that's acting in a verb-like way: all the content words act in a noun-like way. It's not like all roots can be used as either a noun or a verb because there are no verbs, plain and simple.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Soap »

I hate to go off against another conlanger, but isnt Kēlen basically just using a somewhat stronger version of the Basque system? I thought that Basque's verb stems, apart from the small closed class of strong verbs (which Kēlen also has), are essentially just nouns but are described as verbs because nearly all other languages would translate them as verbs (e.g. it's easier to say "come" than "an arrival", etc) despite them behaving syntactically as nouns.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Frislander »

Soap wrote:I hate to go off against another conlanger, but isnt Kēlen basically just using a somewhat stronger version of the Basque system? I thought that Basque's verb stems, apart from the small closed class of strong verbs (which Kēlen also has), are essentially just nouns but are described as verbs because nearly all other languages would translate them as verbs (e.g. it's easier to say "come" than "an arrival", etc) despite them behaving syntactically as nouns.
The difference with Basque is that the inflecting verbs which are left are still contetful in some way (e.g. "hold", "know" or "come"), whereas the Kelen relationals have no such semantic content to them bar delimiting the argument structure and to some extent the telicity of the sentence.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by malloc »

Soap wrote:Would it make sense to put the suffixes only on one of the words in each phrase, since they can be assumed to agree with each other? "Quickbrownfox" etc
Not really. The equivalents of "quick" and "brown" are themselves nominals and must agree with the head noun, rather like adjectives in Romance languages. You could hardly say rapid brunne vulpes in Latin, omitting the masculine nominative endings on the preceding adjectives. Since my conlang has free word order, it needs agreement like that to ensure everything remains connected. How would you know what unmarked "quick" and "brown" are modifying if moved around the sentence?

This problem really frustrates me because the system is otherwise very elegant from a conceptual standpoint. It incorporates nouns into verbal morphology as simply another grammatical form, like participles or moods. It minimizes asymmetry between nouns and verbs, even preserving the valence of the original verb stem (so "nouns" derived from transitive verbs require two arguments). It even provides an elegant way to incorporate the distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. Nominalizing a transitive stem like "to be someone's mother" requires the resulting noun to indicate the possessor:

be.mother-3S.1O "She is my mother" > be.mother-NMLZ-3S.1O "She who is my mother"

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Soap »

I take it, then, that youre not fond of zero morphemes or grammatical fusion? I could see Poswa (my main conlang) evolving into a state where nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, interjections, and pronouns are all merged into just a single part of speech, but for sure the most common inflectional suffix sequence would be replaced by a zero morph, and the next few most common ones would evolve into single-vowel suffixes. Poswa gets by with just nouns and verbs, and nouns in some circumstances have to agree with the verbs, so in Poswa a sentence like pifo pasiom pio "my hand is touching my knee" has the same inflection repeated three times, but it never adds more than one syllable to the word and because of fusion it often adds no syllables at all. (There is a locative case marker on the word for knee.)

Polapufa džuseba rufliba papwopap wempša žuttamba.
Her quick brown fox is jumping over her lazy dog.

In this sentence, the 3ps ending -ba appears on all six words in the sentence, although it is padded by the accusative case marker -p in one word (adjectives do not agree in case with their nouns, which I know is a very unusual feature.) Despite this, I'd say that the sentence isn't monotonous because the -b- of -ba plays with the tail end of the word it attaches to, meaning that only the -a is present in every word, and that it is preceded by different consonants in each case (though /b/ does appear more than the others).
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by jal »

Soap wrote:Poswa gets by with just nouns and verbs (...) adjectives do not agree in case with their nouns
?


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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Dē Graut Bʉr »

Soap wrote:(adjectives do not agree in case with their nouns, which I know is a very unusual feature.)
Actually, it isn't. According to Wikipedia, "In the most common[4] case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic, Mongolian, Quechua, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages."

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by malloc »

Soap wrote:I take it, then, that youre not fond of zero morphemes or grammatical fusion?
Well, the language already has several zero morphemes and instances of fusion. The marker for indicative verbs (as opposed to imperatives, attributives, and so forth) and the inanimate object pronominal suffix are both zero. Although yes, I have tended to avoid relying on zero morphemes for this project. Given the polysynthetic nature of this language, stems without inflectional endings feel somehow naked to me.

Right now, though, I am experimenting with one possible approach that provides some symmetry between nominal and verbal forms while keeping repetition from getting out of hand. Hopefully that will lead somewhere.

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by Soap »

jal wrote:
Soap wrote:Poswa gets by with just nouns and verbs (...) adjectives do not agree in case with their nouns
?


JAL
I'm using "adjective" for convenience, in the same way that Japanese has a verbal form that, to English learners, is often described as an adjective. I think Poswa (and my other conlangs) resemble Japanese in that any adjective can serve as a verb. In English this is not true; perhaps most English adjectives can serve as verbs, such as "redden", "quicken", etc, but certainly not all, since there is no *pregnanten, behappien, etc. Unlike Japanese though, I restrict the term adjective to intransitive verbs, whereas, if my understanding is correct, Japanese adjectives can even be transitive, such that someone will say "a very deer-hunting man", etc.
Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
Soap wrote:(adjectives do not agree in case with their nouns, which I know is a very unusual feature.)
Actually, it isn't. According to Wikipedia, "In the most common[4] case concord system, only the head-word (the noun) in a phrase is marked for case. This system appears in many Papuan languages as well as in Turkic, Mongolian, Quechua, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and other languages."
OK. It still feels wrong somehow, and I suspect there might be some other trait of Poswa that correlates with adjectives being required to agree with their head nouns in case marking and/or other grammatical inflections.

The logic I used was to imagine it as a mini-sentence, e.g. "the dog she jumped over is the lazy one", unlike malloc's setup where all three words are in the same grammatical position and none is dependent on the other two. I guess what feels wrong is that a noun in the accusative case can't be the subject of a verb. Maybe I'll start another thread and bring it up if I cant make a better case for it on my own. (Why I dont just concede and sttart using case agreement is that it would wreck certain other unrelated things.)
malloc wrote:
Soap wrote:I take it, then, that youre not fond of zero morphemes or grammatical fusion?
Well, the language already has several zero morphemes and instances of fusion. The marker for indicative verbs (as opposed to imperatives, attributives, and so forth) and the inanimate object pronominal suffix are both zero. Although yes, I have tended to avoid relying on zero morphemes for this project. Given the polysynthetic nature of this language, stems without inflectional endings feel somehow naked to me.
That's certainly not the stereotypical polysynthesis I'm used to, where a sentence like that could be expressed in a single gigantic word.
Right now, though, I am experimenting with one possible approach that provides some symmetry between nominal and verbal forms while keeping repetition from getting out of hand. Hopefully that will lead somewhere.
Feel free to share more examples if you're interested in feedback.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by malloc »

Looking at this issue another way, just what is the fundamental difference between nouns and verbs? Some sources say that verbs describe events and nouns describe things (although one can easily nominalize events without eliminating their nature as events). Others identify verbs with predicates and nouns with the arguments of those predicates. I would imagine theories of syntax would have much to say about the difference between nouns and verbs, but my focus on synthetic languages has left my knowledge of syntax seriously impoverished.

Within the context of polysynthesis, I would say the difference is partly that verbs can form complete clauses and thus sentences whereas nouns cannot. In other words work-IND-3S "she works" can form its own sentence while work-NMLZ-3S "she who works" merely forms a sentence fragment. I suppose this amounts to saying the former is a predicate and the latter an argument. Another difference is that adverbs can modify verbs but not nouns, hence one could say quick-ADV work-IND-3S "she works quickly" but certainly not quick-ADV work-NMLZ-3S for instance. Putting those points together, it appears that verbs have some property that makes them predicates rather than arguments and allows adverbs to modify them.
Zompist wrote:As a syntax fan, I tend to think we should ban the word "adverb". :P So far as I know, it's easiest to understand Finnish cases as cases, but then I'm familiar with cases. If someone wasn't, I'd probably explain them by analogy with prepositions, not adverbs.
Returning to this point: if you don't believe in adverbs, then what lexical class would you consider the words conventionally labeled as adverbs? It seems difficult to call the word "quickly" a noun, an adjective, or anything else along those lines. Adverbs, at least in the sense of words which modify verbs as opposed to adjectives modifying nouns, seem pretty distinct to me.

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by rotting bones »

I think of languages as structural rather than formal systems. The difference is that in a formal system, each term has a definition, but in a structural system, terms are defined by how they are used relative to each other. Each language with the noun/verb distinction is a set of conventions that treats some phenomena as things and others as events. These usages developed as a result of the diachronic history of the language constrained, of course, by human biology as well as practicality within the way of life of its speakers. Within this model, speaking of the essence of nouns and verbs is like trying to discover what is special about the right side of the road that makes it appropriate to drive on.
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Post by Ser »

Zju wrote:Any other languages with such or similar feature?
How many are there in Bulgarian? I think there's literally only two of such in Spanish:

Correveidile
corre-ve-y-di-le
run.2SG.IMP-see.2SG.IMP-and-tell.2SG.IMP-him/her
'a gossip, tattler'

Tentempié
ten-te-en-pie
hold.2SG.IMP-yourself-on-foot
'a snack' (lit. "a keep-standing-on-your-feet")
(this word is particular to Spain)

Spanish also has a similar word formed from the 1st person singular present-tense form. It's probably the only one of its kind though.

Metomentodo
meto-me-en-todo
put.in.1SG.PRES-myself-in-everything
'a meddler, busybody'
(I think this word is also particular to Spain, but I'm not sure. In Latin America entrometido/entremetido is more common.)
And yes, the last one does literally translate to 'trip a stone (over sth.)!' instead of 'trip over a stone!'
What would "trip a stone over something" literally mean in English? To trip something usually means walking over something lightly and quickly ("to trip a path"), and I'm not sure how to add "over" to that.

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Serafín wrote:How many are there in Bulgarian?
He said a "dozen or so."

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by alice »

malloc wrote:Looking at this issue another way, just what is the fundamental difference between nouns and verbs?
For what it's worth, Describing Morphosyntax describes nouns as representing the most time-stable concepts and verbs as the least.
Zompist's Markov generator wrote:it was labelled" orange marmalade," but that is unutterably hideous.

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by xxx »

By removing verbs, I lost
  • distinction between topic and comment,
  • distinction between substance and accident,
  • distinction between word and sentence,
  • all speech acts,
  • causal reasoning,
  • and even chronology
  • ...

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by rotting bones »

I think it is totally possible to use nouns and adjectives to talk about time: Past sunrise and future sunset. Or causal reasoning: Either no rain or slippery sidewalk. This is not to say it's convenient.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by xxx »

I think, from my experiment, heptapod B has no verb...

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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by rotting bones »

xxx wrote:I think, from my experiment, heptapod B has no verb...
I don't get it.
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