zompist bboard

I wanted to know more about it, however my googlefu failed me. Help ?

mèþru wrote:https://prezi.com/qwokkakcxlcq/introduc ... clinaison/

That completely blew my mind. Are there any more like that, and if so, where can I find them?

mèþru wrote:https://prezi.com/qwokkakcxlcq/introduc ... clinaison/

I almost threw up trying to figure anything out from that presentation.

Pole, the wrote:

mèþru wrote:https://prezi.com/qwokkakcxlcq/introduc ... clinaison/

I almost threw up trying to figure anything out from that presentation.

likewise

Even though I posted the link, I don't understand the presentation either.

It likely made more sense with Christophe speaking over it.

Tl;Dr (that I only got by looking up a blog post he made) is that Basque lets you use an inflected form as a base for new inflections. But as far as I can tell, by "inflection" he mostly means "derivation." I'm not particularly knowledgeable here, but isn't the claim that it's found just in Basque a little... misleading, misinformed, or Basque Is Special^TM? Or am I misunderstanding what he's saying? I though that it's pretty common to allow inflected forms be used as a basis for further derivation and stack up derivational+inflectional material quite a bit, including Eskimo-Aleut languages where it's theoretically (though obviously not practically) possible to do it an arbitrarily large number of times.

Ive always done that with my conlangs & Ive figured that the reason it doesnt happen in IE is that in iE you can tell what case .e.g a noun is in by looking at its suffix. e.g. there is no way to take the genitive of the genitive, because nominatives always end in a nominative suffix. if there was no such thing as a nominative suffix, every noun in every case could serve as a theoretically nominal ending./ e.g. " l;uk" , genitive "luko", genitive of genitive is "lukuo" (oo>uo early on_)

its a "self segregating morphollogy"

It helps if your langugae is either non-fusional or has only a few possible word endings.

i would think Eskimo-Aleut qualifies as fusional and not having just a few possible word endings.

alynnidalar wrote:It likely made more sense with Christophe speaking over it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBeD9mw9_bo

mèþru wrote:Even though I posted the link, I don't understand the presentation either.

Yng wrote:

Pole, the wrote:

mèþru wrote:https://prezi.com/qwokkakcxlcq/introduc ... clinaison/

I almost threw up trying to figure anything out from that presentation.

likewise

It's pretty simple really. Most of the presented stuff is just your regular agglutinative morphology. What Surdéclinaison referes to, I think, is derivations like gizonarenarena

gizon-a-ren-a-ren-a

man-DEF-GEN-DEF-GEN-DEF

the one of the one of the man. Consider the following:
gizon bat a man
gizona the man
gizonaren of the man
gizonarena the one of the man
gizonarenakin with the one of the man
gizonarenara to the one of the man
gizonarenaren of the one of the man
gizonarenarena the one of the one of the man
etc. It could go on forever. I guess when it comes to the genitive -(r)en and locative genitive -ko the boundary between inflectional and derivational morphology is blurred. Such things is most definitely not found only in Basque, even the presentation gave another language as an example, I think.
Also, the relativizer and complementizer and fusional clitics (suffixes?), which I find much more unusual.
Which reminds me, I need to renew my Basque studies.

Zju wrote:Such things is most definitely not found only in Basque, even the presentation gave another language as an example, I think.

I thought that was a conlang. Certainly the name wasn't the least bit familiar.

Soap wrote:i would think Eskimo-Aleut qualifies as fusional

What?! Eskimoo-Aleut fusional?

Karero wrote:

Soap wrote:i would think Eskimo-Aleut qualifies as fusional

What?! Eskimoo-Aleut fusional?

I'm with this. I've heard Athabascan called fusional-polysynthetic, I've said before I think you can make a case for Wakashan. But Eskimo-Aleut? It's up there with Turkish as one of the most regular, least fusional languages I've ever run across.

Soap wrote:... the reason it doesnt happen in IE ...

That depends on what you mean by IE and what you mean by "doesn't happen". For example, in Classical Greek one can inflect a genitive by putting the second case marking on a preceding definite article. In English, one can add the genitive to the genitive, e.g. "Richard's's wheels need oiling", referring to the wheels of my bicycle, though more frequently one would suppress the implicit reference to the bicycle.

Karero wrote:

Soap wrote:i would think Eskimo-Aleut qualifies as fusional

What?! Eskimoo-Aleut fusional?

Eskimo-Aleut is sometimes classified as fusional because it has portmanteau case/number (on nouns) and tense/aspect/person/number suffixes (on verbs), similar to those of IE languages, which are of course considered a paragon of fusionality. Surely, the postbase chains EA uses to derive new words are pretty agglutinating, though.

Can't we just call it suffixaufnahme? That LCC talk is literally the only place I've seen anybody call it "surdeclinaison" in English. Everybody else just uses the German, and I think it's basically a loanword at this point. The Christophe guy seems to be trying to convince everyone else that both terms are equally in-use but I think that's only true in his head.

EDIT: Googling both terms, I find lots of relevant results for "suffixaufnahme" but for "surdeclinaison" all the results are either in French or by that same guy again, with only one exception.

If I've understood this correctly, the biggest difference between prototypical suffixaufnahme of say Old Georgian and the surdéclinaison of Basque seems to be that with suffixaufnahme, the modifier agrees with the head in case (and/or some other category), whereas with surdéclinaison, the modifier takes an an adnominal case (like the genitive) without any agreement.

Example: "to the man on the street"
suffixaufnahme: the_man–DAT the_street–LOC–DAT
surdéclinaison: the_man–DAT the_street–LOC–GEN

Apparently, the Basque surdéclinaison may also have wider uses beyond double case marking on nouns. For example, genitive can be placed after adverbial phrases to make them adnominal. But something similar could probably exist in languages with suffixaufnahme as well. Grandsire-Koevoets discussed suffixaufnahme and surdéclinaison here:
https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi ... 8&header=1

That post is also by the same Christophe guy, who seems to be an engineer and not a professional linguist. Just because he says it doesn't make it true-- and he seems to be the only person saying this! This entire "surdeclinaison" business seems be being pushed by him and no one else. Are we to start introducing new technical terms and distinctions into linguistics just because one conlanger on the internet tells us to?

EDIT: It seems that the phenomenon that Christophe wants us all to start calling "surdeclinaison" is referred to elsewhere as "Suffixhäufung". So let's call it that.

Xephyr wrote:That post is also by the same Christophe guy, who seems to be an engineer and not a professional linguist.

I know it's the same guy, I just used his last name because it seemed more polite than calling him "the Christophe guy".

Xephyr wrote:Just because he says it doesn't make it true-- and he seems to be the only person saying this! This entire "surdeclinaison" business seems be being pushed by him and no one else. Are we to start introducing new technical terms and distinctions into linguistics just because one conlanger on the internet tells us to?

I don't know enough to comment on the quality of his analysis of Basque or whether this is really a new phenomenon that warrants its own term.

However, I don't think suffixaufnahme is the right term here since its usually underatood to involve case agreement. It seems that authors writing about suffixaufnahme typically don't apply it to Basque, e.g. Winfried Boeder:
"Notice that a language like Basque has productive multiple case-number marking with ellipsis and afterthought, but no Suffixaufnahme (Lafitte 1979: 61 §145)"
From p 187 in Frans Plank (ed.), "Double Case – Agreement by Suffixaufnahme"

Edit: Authors do disagree on how to use the term suffixaufnahme, though. For example, it is sometimes applied to languages such as Sumerian which have a special type of case displacement where (if I've understood it correctly) all case markers of the noun phrase appears at the end of the phrase, so that multiple case markers can appear stacked after a modifying noun (see Ariastar, p. 431, same book). I think this is slightly different from Basque, however.

Yes, I also have that book-- it's where I initially found mention of "Suffixhäufung". But whether you call what Basque has Suffixhäufung or Suffixaufnahme, my point is that "surdeclinaison" seems to be hardly used in English-language publications.

Xephyr wrote:Yes, I also have that book-- it's where I initially found mention of "Suffixhäufung". But whether you call what Basque has Suffixhäufung or Suffixaufnahme, my point is that "surdeclinaison" seems to be hardly used in English-language publications.

The way I understand the book, I don't think either of those terms should be used for what Basque has. However, the book has an additional term, hypostasis, which seems to cover part of what Grandsire-Koevoets calls "surdéclinaison", but not all. Looking into it a bit further, it seems that Grandsire-Koevoets' "surdéclinaison" lumps together two different phenomena.

The term suffixhäufung (it seems odd to capitalize it in English) seems to be used for phrase-final case stacking of the Sumerian type mentioned above (p. 50 & 453f.). In language with this type of marking, all case markers of the noun phrase are stacked at the end regardless of which noun they belong to. A modifier can thus appear to be marked for the case of the head, while the head is unmarked. The total number of case markers are the same as in a more "classical" system (like Latin). A Sumerian example:

é šes lugal-ak-ak-a

house brother king-Gen-Gen-Loc
'in the house of the brother of the king'

This is different from "suffixaufnahme proper" (p. 453) where all nouns are case marked and modifiers take further case marking to agree with the head. From Gumbaynggir:

ba:ba-gu junuy-gundi-yu
father-Erg child-Gen-Erg
'the child's father'

Some authors may have a wider use of the term suffixaufnahme that includes both suffixhäufung and suffixaufnahme proper. Grandsire-Koevoets apparently does this in the presentation, calling them group marking and word marking.

Then we have hypostasis. The term specifically applies to headless constructions, where the "dependent" takes the case marking that would have appeared on the head. This is similar to what you get in a language with suffixaufnahme proper if the head is elided (which tend to be allowed from what I understand), and it is what you get with suffixhäufung if you elide the head but keep its case marking. Some authors may include hypostasis under the umbrella of suffixaufnahme in the wider sense (although many do not). Basque does seem to have hypostasis, the book even inlcudes an example from Basque to illustrate this phenomenon (p. 453):

gizon-aren-ari
man-Gen-Dat
'to that of the man'

From what I understand, Basque only uses this type of "agreement" (which influcludes definiteness and number as well) if there is no explicit head, i.e. it has hypostasis but not suffixhäufung or suffixaufnahme (in the narrow sense). Many of the examples of "surdéclinaison" given by Grandsire-Koevoets for Basque, and the examples by Zju in this thread, appears to be examples of hypostasis. In another publication, Plank (the editor of the book on suffixaufnahme) uses "surdéclinaison" in quotes for the Basque hypostatis or inflected genitive formation:
https://books.google.se/books?id=ZhSk55yiyk4C&pg=PA363

I found one other English-language mention of the term in the literature, which also involves hypostasis:
https://books.google.se/books?id=BemPapPEBYAC&pg=PA120

In addition to the hypostasis, Grandsire-Koevoets' presentation also includes examples of what he calls "surdéclinaison" where there is an explicit head. He gives the following examples in the presentation:

arotz–a–(r)ekila
blacksmith–ART–COM
‘with the blacksmith’

arotz–a–(r)ekila–ko gizon–a
blacksmith–ART–COM–GEN.LOC man–ART
‘the man who is with the blacksmith’

Here, the case marking is retained in the "expected" place (unlike suffixhäufung) but there is an additional marker to indicate the subordinate function of the modifier. This is different from suffixaufnahme where the modifying noun agrees with the head in case.

This type of construction is superficially similar to hypostasis in that both constructions involve multiple markers, but apart from that, they actually seem quite different to me; they basically serve opposite functions. With hypostasis, a dependent noun is "promoted" to a head and receives marking for both functions. With this type of "surdéclinaison", a special marker is used to show that a noun is "demoted" to a dependent function. The two can be combined, example from the presentation:

poneta–a–(r)ekila–ko–a–(r)ekin
beret–ART–COM–GEN.LOC–ART–COM
‘With the one who is wearing the beret’

The "demoting" construction seems somewhat similar to a compound case constructions, where a single case is made up of multiple affixes that each contribute to its function (in this case comitative + subordinate or something like that). Compound case is not unheard of in other langauges, although I haven't been able to find an example where one marker is used to mark subordination. Alternatively, the genitive may not actually be a case marker here but a relativizer/subordinator/adjectivalizer or something like that, such suffixes are found in other languages. Apparently, relative clauses is also marked with a "genitive" marker. My knowledge of Basque is quite limited, though.

I don't know how the term surdéclinaison is used in the French literature, but it's possible that it's only used to refers to the Basque hypostasis and that Grandsire-Koevoets extended it to cover both constructions. I don't know if there is an established term for the "demoting" part of Grandsire-Koevoets' "Surdéclinaison" but in any case, I don't think it should be called suffixhäufung or suffixaufnahme. The difference can be illustrated with this example (from the discussion thread linked above):

’(I gave it) to a man from Bilbao’
"Classical": man–DAT Bilbao–ABL
Suffixaufnahme: man–DAT Bilbao–ABL–DAT
Suffixhäufung: man Bilbao–ABL–DAT
"Surdéclinaison": man–DAT Bilbao–ABL–GEN

Valdeut wrote:The term suffixhäufung (it seems odd to capitalize it in English)

Agreed. I further move that we pronounce both words with /sʌfɪks/- rather than /zufɪks/-.

In another publication, Plank (the editor of the book on suffixaufnahme) uses "surdéclinaison" in quotes for the Basque hypostatis or inflected genitive formation:
https://books.google.se/books?id=ZhSk55yiyk4C&pg=PA363

Ah, I hadn't noticed that it was the same author. His use of quotations makes me a little wary, but otherwise okay: you've convinced me that "surdeclinaison" is a real linguistics term (especially since that book is more recent than Double Case).

What I'm not yet convinced of, though, is whether hypostasis and surdeclinaison are actually different phenomena from suffixaufnahme or suffixhaufung. Perhaps I am missing something, but they both seem to just be headless constructions of suffixaufnahme (or suffixhaufung-- the distinction being erased in headless phrases anyway), which would just be a language-by-language thing regarding which ones allow headless constructions and which don't... there's no need to posit an entirely new species of suffix-stacking, right? Many languages allow headless relative clauses, but we still just call them "relative clauses".

Xephyr wrote:I further move that we pronounce both words with /sʌfɪkx/- rather than /zufɪks/-.

Wut

oops