zompist bboard

Postulate a language in which the following are true:

- Adjectival notions are expressed by verbs, thus instead of "long" there is a adjective "to be long".
- Some types of noun (e.g. inanimates in an animacy hierarchy) cannot be the grammatical subject of the verb.
- "stick" is such a noun.

How would "the stick is long" be expressed? Something like "is-long-UNEXPRESSED-SUBJECT stick-ABS"?

- Some types of noun (e.g. inanimates in an animacy hierarchy) cannot be the grammatical subject of the verb.

I'd understand if such a restriction existed for the agent, but for an intransitive subject it's quite weird.

Let alone “this stick is long”. How are you going to express “it is a stick”? (Spoiler: you can't.)

What you could do, though, is to make inanimate subjects of intransitive verbs expressed as objects. But that makes it, I think, a quite standard fluid-S active-stative language.

It seems quite unlikely to me. Morphologically, the noun might not be able to take subject marking or trigger verb agreement, but I'd expect it to behave syntactically as the subject of inanimate stative verbs. As the Pole points out, this is the ergative morphological alignment pattern.

I'll be honest, I literally dont understand the qiestonm, i clicked in because my main language does this too. I dont see a problem, since even inanimate objects can always be the agent of an intransitive verb. It is transitive verbs that are forbidden.

I'd expect some languages might handle it via noun incorporation: be.long-stick-TAM-pn...etc. One could even speculate that be.long is already a classificatory verb deriving from a denominal of stick so that be.long-3s can mean both "it is long" and "stick"--many polysynthetic languages are very...flexible about what is a verb (or phrase) and what is a noun. (viz., Iroquoian or Salishan, for example).

alice wrote:- Some types of noun (e.g. inanimates in an animacy hierarchy) cannot be the grammatical subject of the verb.

This seems like the weird part. Nishnaabemwin, for instance, has animacy and adjectival verbs just fine. And inanimate objects can definitely be the subject of intransitive verbs.

You go on to mention the absolutive; but the absolutive generally is the grammatical subject in erg/abs languages, IIRC.

Maybe you mean that inanimates can't be agents (i.e. subjects of transitive verbs)?

Maybe silly idea, but you could require that the verb be made passive and then express the inanimate subject like an instrument. "Is-been-long using-stick"

Imralu wrote:Maybe silly idea, but you could require that the verb be made passive and then express the inanimate subject like an instrument. "Is-been-long using-stick"

Alternatively, and this has just occurred to me, you could have the verb take inverse marking when used with inanimates (apparently some Mixe-Zoquean languages have intransitive verbs take inverse marking, and this seems like the sort of circumstance where it might come up)

Otherwise I would say you have a supremely artificial restriction: inanimates being barred from agent-hood makes sense but referring to such language-specific notions as "grammatical subject", with all the different semantic roles which could be mixed up in that, is practically nonsensical, especially if the ban extends to this context. The only languages I know with restrictions even close to this (some Algonquian languages) aren't nominative-accusative (I'm guessing that's the alignment you're presuming when you say "grammatical subject") anyhow: they have the hierarchical alignment with direct-inverse marking.

Thus barring inanimate nouns from being the subject of stative-verbs makes zero sense (bar my initial suggestion at the start of my reply).

EDIT: I've just taken a look at a grammar of Ayutla Mixe, and the intransitive-inverse verbs are a small class of what could be better described as ambitranstive verbs where the "agent/theme" is inanimate and therefore it's only the undergoer that's ever marked on the verb, e.g. "be sick". So even that's not really a get-out.

Pole, the wrote:What you could do, though, is to make inanimate subjects of intransitive verbs expressed as objects. But that makes it, I think, a quite standard fluid-S active-stative language.

Right, that's what I was thinking. From an English perspective, it's almost like the stative verb is a transitive with a null subject, i.e. "it longs the stick".