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

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

Post by Pole, the »

xxx wrote: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
  • ...
I bet I could think of at least one common Polish phrase that is also a counterexample for each of your points.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by xxx »

it is not a matter of removing one verb to one sentence (even Polish) but of verb-less language (surely not Polish)...

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

Post by malloc »

alice wrote:For what it's worth, Describing Morphosyntax describes nouns as representing the most time-stable concepts and verbs as the least.
Sure, but one could easily treat the same concept as either a noun or verb without affecting its time-stability. Returning to my previous examples, one could take the same stem for "fox" and inflect it to mean "the fox" or "she is a fox". More generally, one could distinguish "the-fox she-is-brown" versus "she-is-a-fox the-brown-one". It seems to me like the relevant difference is argument versus predicate moreso than anything inherent to the semantics of a word.

I think the basic challenge of this project is distinguishing arguments and predicates through the inflectional system, and making the results elegant. The problem that keeps emerging is the repetition associated with marking words as arguments, indicating their person and such through pronominal suffixes, and so forth. The conceptual elegance of merging nouns and verbs into one lexical class gets spoiled when the same suffixes occur half a dozen times in rapid succession (if I may repeat myself once again...).

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

Post by Imralu »

Really "half a dozen" though? Surely that'd only be when you start saying things like "My beautiful big expensive brown Chinese leather bags", no? And when you do that in Spanish, there'd be s'es everywhere too.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by rotting bones »

malloc wrote:Sure, but one could easily treat the same concept as either a noun or verb without affecting its time-stability. Returning to my previous examples, one could take the same stem for "fox" and inflect it to mean "the fox" or "she is a fox". More generally, one could distinguish "the-fox she-is-brown" versus "she-is-a-fox the-brown-one". It seems to me like the relevant difference is argument versus predicate moreso than anything inherent to the semantics of a word.

I think the basic challenge of this project is distinguishing arguments and predicates through the inflectional system, and making the results elegant. The problem that keeps emerging is the repetition associated with marking words as arguments, indicating their person and such through pronominal suffixes, and so forth. The conceptual elegance of merging nouns and verbs into one lexical class gets spoiled when the same suffixes occur half a dozen times in rapid succession (if I may repeat myself once again...).
Arbitrarily make some classes of words incapable of hosting certain suffixes. Just make sure the results don't line up with what is commonly thought of as nouns and verbs.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by vokzhen »

malloc wrote:
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?
I assume he means multiple categories, because "adverb" is a garbage-bin category for a bunch of words that behave very differently from each other but don't fit in any other traditional category. "Slowly," "hurriedly," etc form a category, but they have basically nothing in common with words/constructions like "not," "very, "furthermore," "here," "for buying food," or "because I was angry."

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

Post by Pole, the »

malloc wrote:Sure, but one could easily treat the same concept as either a noun or verb without affecting its time-stability. Returning to my previous examples, one could take the same stem for "fox" and inflect it to mean "the fox" or "she is a fox". More generally, one could distinguish "the-fox she-is-brown" versus "she-is-a-fox the-brown-one". It seems to me like the relevant difference is argument versus predicate moreso than anything inherent to the semantics of a word.

I think the basic challenge of this project is distinguishing arguments and predicates through the inflectional system, and making the results elegant. The problem that keeps emerging is the repetition associated with marking words as arguments, indicating their person and such through pronominal suffixes, and so forth. The conceptual elegance of merging nouns and verbs into one lexical class gets spoiled when the same suffixes occur half a dozen times in rapid succession (if I may repeat myself once again...).
I don't know if it's the thing you're talking about, but in Perkelen (a conlang of mine from a few years back) I somewhat inverted the usual patterns by limiting the personal marking to a closed set of noun-like pronouns and having a separate case to distinguish the arguments (the topic) from the predicatives (the comment).

So, for example, “she is a fox” would be something like «he/she-TOPIC fox», “the fox is brown” would be «fox-TOPIC brown.one» and “the brown one is a fox“ would be «brown.one-TOPIC fox».
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by xxx »

Pole, the wrote:So, for example, “she is a fox” would be something like «he/she-TOPIC fox», “the fox is brown” would be «fox-TOPIC brown.one» and “the brown one is a fox“ would be «brown.one-TOPIC fox».
Verless, we have;
“she is a fox”>"the fox female"
“the fox is brown”>"the brown fox"
“the brown one is a fox“ >"the fox brown"

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

Post by malloc »

So, what do people here think about claims that the Salishan languages have no distinction between nouns and verbs? Assuming that the analyses making this claim are accurate, would you argue that the language simply pairs every noun with a phonologically identical verb meaning "to be NOUN"? For that matter, what would it take for a language to qualify as having no distinction between nouns and verbs?

It has also occurred to me that my current system has no clear way of handling adverbs and adpositions. Zompist may pooh-pooh the concept of adverbs, but it seems incredibly useful to clarify whether something is happening quickly or slowly, today or yesterday, and so forth. However, they seem rather tricky from the perspective of agreement. What does "quickly" agree with in the sentence "the fox jumped quickly"?

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

Post by Soap »

I'd be curious to see more information. What is the morpheme breakdown of sbiaw "coyote"? If it's a verb, can it be used transitively? Can I coyote a bottle? Can I bottle a coyote?

And what about proper nouns? What's the Lushootseed word for Philadelphia? Can I Philadelphia an umbrella?

What about pronouns? Can you she a me?

I'm skeptical that there exists any human language outside of conlangs that has no nouns. Perhaps words like sbiaw can be analyzed as intransitive verbs because they have no overt morphology marking them as nouns, but then you have a division between verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive on one hand, and verbs that can be only intransitive on the other. I'd just simplify it and call that the same old verb/noun distinction we all know and love.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by vokzhen »

malloc wrote:So, what do people here think about claims that the Salishan languages have no distinction between nouns and verbs?
Overstated. If, using Halkomelem as an example, you have a whole class off roots that don't take all available verb-like morphology (progressive aspect), do take all available noun-like morphology, much more commonly show up as arguments than heads, have a CVCVC canonical shape, and on top of that are generally noun-y concepts in other languages, it's gonna be a tough sell to say they can't be distinguished from those that *do* take all verb-like morphology, *don't* take all noun-like morphology (possessives), much more commonly show up as heads than arguments, have strictly a CAC~CəC~CəCC shape, and are generally verb-y concepts in other languages.

Mande have a better case, imo, but still one that can't be entirely accepted. In Mandinka, all verbs except "die" can undergo nominalization with the meaning of "the event of Xing" or "being Xed," but there's still syntactic differences between these and "genuine" nouns, e.g. verb-root nominal phrases appear not to be able to take plurals and only rarely take "determiners," and are modifiable by postpositional phrases and manner adverbs unlike nouns. There *are* a class of words that are freely used both nominally and verbally, but while always related (be.sick/sickness, speak/story, be.annoyed/problem, fight/army~battle), their exact relationship is not transparent, and it seems to me to have more in common with zero-derivation.
malloc wrote:Zompist may pooh-pooh the concept of adverbs, but it seems incredibly useful to clarify whether something is happening quickly or slowly, today or yesterday, and so forth.
Again, it has nothing to do with usefulness of the words, it has to do with the usefulness of the category. "Adverb" does not form any kind of cohesive grouping, they are formed differently, derived differently, have different functions, modify different types of heads, have different syntax. It would be like if we threw genitives, relative clauses, spatial adpositions (including verb-modifying ones), modifying nouns, and adjectives into the single category of "adnominals." Sure, in some languages those might actually all act similarly, but they certainly don't all the time, or even in a significant minority of languages.
malloc wrote:However, they seem rather tricky from the perspective of agreement. What does "quickly" agree with in the sentence "the fox jumped quickly"?
Archi has some pretty extreme agreement, including some agreement between manner adverb and absolutive.

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

Post by Frislander »

Soap wrote:I'd be curious to see more information. What is the morpheme breakdown of sbiaw "coyote"? If it's a verb, can it be used transitively? Can I coyote a bottle? Can I bottle a coyote?
Well a prefix s- is the near-universal Salishan "nominaliser", though it still occurs on main verbs in certain instances (see this grammar of Saanich for other examples).
I'm skeptical that there exists any human language outside of conlangs that has no nouns. Perhaps words like sbiaw can be analyzed as intransitive verbs because they have no overt morphology marking them as nouns, but then you have a division between verbs that can be either transitive or intransitive on one hand, and verbs that can be only intransitive on the other. I'd just simplify it and call that the same old verb/noun distinction we all know and love.
vokzhen wrote:Overstated. If, using Halkomelem as an example, you have a whole class off roots that don't take all available verb-like morphology (progressive aspect), do take all available noun-like morphology, much more commonly show up as arguments than heads, have a CVCVC canonical shape, and on top of that are generally noun-y concepts in other languages, it's gonna be a tough sell to say they can't be distinguished from those that *do* take all verb-like morphology, *don't* take all noun-like morphology (possessives), much more commonly show up as heads than arguments, have strictly a CAC~CəC~CəCC shape, and are generally verb-y concepts in other languages.
Well a lot of what the features you both describe might easily apply to stative verbs, so perhaps a language could be lacking a traditional noun-verb distinction but it could have a distinction between dynamic and stative verbs which takes up a different semantic space. The issue of phonological shape is more problematic, since stative verbs appear to behave like normal verbs with regard to root shape, but as with most rules like this there are always exceptions.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by rotting bones »

It occurs to me that if you're going to use affixes to mark words as nouns or verbs, then it is possible to generalize that approach into sentential paradigms:

Jin-red sha-ball.
The ball is red.

Jin-blue sha-sea.
The sea is blue.

Wa-ball fei-red.
The ball is red.

Wa-sea fei-blue.
The sea is blue.

Jin-ball sha-red.
The red thing is spherical.

Those prefixes determine the slots to which qualities are assigned. Granted this is inefficient for simple sentences, but now which words are nouns or verbs? You could say the quality being attributed is the verb, or you could say that that the function of the noun-verb distinction is being carried out by grammatical categories. From a layman's perspective, neither of those analyses seem inherently better.

PS. You could also reuse prefixes that sound the same in other paradigms without ambiguity as long as the paradigms don't end up sounding too much like each other.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by xxx »

To reach the goal, just unmark‘em...

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

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(Disclaimer: I'm not sure I'm making sense right now. Please point out areas where my argument seems weak.)
xxx wrote:To reach the goal, just unmark‘em...
I don't think "pidgin" is the kind of answer he's looking for, because the question is probably: How can I express the way in which the words in a sentence relate to each other without marking some of them off as nouns and/or verbs?

There are infinitely many ways of doing this, but you cannot start from an a priori standpoint. To temporarily factor out the aesthetics part so you can focus on the crafting component that's confusing you: You need to start by listing some of the kinds of relations between words that you will use your language to express. You can then group them off into categories such that your language will not distinguish between the relations within each category. Finally, come up with a code that communicates the category of interrelationship your sentence intends to express.

To do this, starting from sentential paradigms and leveling off seems like a useful strategy. I can't say for sure because I haven't tried it yet. By contrast, if you start with a grammar-free pidgin, you will have to simulate the creole genesis process yourself. This will lead you back to the question you started from without having given you new tools to work with.
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Re: Minimizing the noun-verb distinction? [split from Random

Post by malloc »

vokzhen wrote:Again, it has nothing to do with usefulness of the words, it has to do with the usefulness of the category. "Adverb" does not form any kind of cohesive grouping, they are formed differently, derived differently, have different functions, modify different types of heads, have different syntax. It would be like if we threw genitives, relative clauses, spatial adpositions (including verb-modifying ones), modifying nouns, and adjectives into the single category of "adnominals." Sure, in some languages those might actually all act similarly, but they certainly don't all the time, or even in a significant minority of languages.
Well ok then, that makes sense. Since my project is polysynthetic, many concepts we associate with adverbs would occur as affixes on the verbal stem itself. One can imagine incorporated adverbials for notions like "completely" and "again" and so forth. But the language still needs some way of handling concepts like "quickly" and "intelligently", in other words deriving adverbs from existing roots.

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

Post by malloc »

I have considered something like participles as one possible solution to my problems. Basically some suffixes which turn verbal stems into arguments while assigning them noun class and such. The resulting argument words would retain their original valence, with those derived from transitive stems taking pronominal suffixes to mark their object. This would have the interesting side effect of approximating inalienable possession, since nouns derived from transitive verbs would have to agree with objects whereas intransitive ones would not. [Under the current system, most things that are usually possessed are expressed with transitive verbs where the object represents the possessor, anyway].

quick-IND-3S "She is quick"
quick-PROX.AN.NMLZ "quick one"
mother-IND-3>1 "she is my mother"
mother-PROX.AN.NMLZ-1S "my mother (PROX)"
shelter-IND-3inan>1 "it shelters me"
shelter-INAN.NMLZ-1S "my house"
vokzhen wrote:Again, it has nothing to do with usefulness of the words, it has to do with the usefulness of the category. "Adverb" does not form any kind of cohesive grouping, they are formed differently, derived differently, have different functions, modify different types of heads, have different syntax. It would be like if we threw genitives, relative clauses, spatial adpositions (including verb-modifying ones), modifying nouns, and adjectives into the single category of "adnominals." Sure, in some languages those might actually all act similarly, but they certainly don't all the time, or even in a significant minority of languages.
Well ok then, that makes sense. Since my project is polysynthetic, many concepts we associate with adverbs would occur as affixes on the verbal stem itself. One can imagine incorporated adverbials for notions like "completely" and "again" and so forth. But the language still needs some way of handling concepts like "quickly" and "intelligently", in other words deriving adverbs from existing roots.

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