Zompist Bboard Again

I guess the most useful way to draw the line for the purposes of this test is to distinguish languages in which there are object markers that regularly occur even in the presence of an overt object NP. You'll want to decide what to say about languages in which those object markers occur only with (s...

Are prepositions even a thing in a head-final SOV lang? Do I need a indirect object marker? There's Germanic. But your preposition seems also to be a verb with OV order, so having it switch seems strange to me. (To be honest when I first read mita yempa-n tahe , I just assumed you had a null existe...

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 03, 2020 3:12 pm Not to turn this into the HDYP thread, but I'm pretty sure I have [ʔk] there. Maybe that's what I have in bookcase too, come to think?

I think that's what I have (for bookcase).

I'll follow up on zompist a bit. One thing is that if you've got a language in which ergative subjects cannot be questioned or relativised or whatever, that's by itself reason to think that the constructions in question involve movement, even if the movement isn't evident on the surface. Syntactic e...

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Aug 02, 2020 1:17 am That’s an interesting analysis — I would have assumed that both articles are analysed the same way. Why are they analysed differently?

Not sure, and now I'm full of doubts

How come? I know there are plenty of differences between the semantics of definite and indefinite articles, but I had imagined that their syntax would at least be comparable. I think indefinite articles are generally thought to be a part of the NP, whereas a definite article takes an NP as its comp...

Alright, clearly my original question was horribly vague and didn’t get me the sort of answers I was looking for. So let me re-ask my question in a different form: Is there any language in which articles appear closer to the noun than adjectives or relative clauses? Hopefully that should be unambig...

Would something like "all the young dudes" count?

My Haskell is very weak But I'll have a look.

So for my own purposes I've learned (I think!) how to make and install an input method on OSX. I could be missing something, but I don't think it should be too hard to convert Conkey, if I had the basic mapping in a format I understood. (Conkey.klc looks like it wouldn't take too much explanation?)

Can you say Je prends souvent la voiture?

Trask and Millar’s Historical Linguistics (which I’m reading now) has an interesting example: Jean, il l’a achetée, la bagnole . Now, I don’t know French, but to me this certainly looks like an example of polypersonal agreement. Note the commas, though; you can sort of get away with the same thing ...

I'd say genitive -'s -s' still counts as a case marker... Why not as a postposition, though? It can even appear on a verb, typically one at the end of a relative clause. A noun phrase composed of a pronoun is the only clear exception, though coordinate noun phrases (e.g. 'you and me') are near the ...

Ser wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 12:22 pm

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 1:20 am1.1. English has periphrastic aspect, and what case-marking it has is by suppletion.

Suppletive case marking? In personal pronouns, you mean?

I'd say genitive -'s -s' still counts as a case marker...

Oops, and yeah, it was dumb not to mention that.

Fun thing: a few months ago I had a small argument/discussion with zompist because he also holds this idea that a language can be said to have object agreement if object pronouns (nearly) always appear to replace an absent NP. And of course, we were discussing French. :D Defining it that way, it al...

Aren't all of these cases of dative alternation? "I read the book to you", "I sang a song to him", "I threw the ball to him", etc. The reason there's no "I photographed him the view" is that there's no "I photographed the view to him", you have to s...

Yeah, it's a good question. Mandarin and Cantonese at least don't let object pronouns reduce, as far as I know (though it wouldn't shock me if there are varieties/registers of Mandarin where object pronouns lose their tones; Ser?). Interesting; I didn’t know that. (Though I suspect that their rathe...

[*] 2.15. As WALS defines things, English has object agreement. (Object clitics that must attach to the verb and are present only in the absence of an overt object count, and English has those.) You mean object marking, not object agreement. English does not have object agreement, and the question ...

Does that make it any less gendered? I was under the impression that even purely semantic gender is still a grammatical gender system. (And it isn’t even purely semantic: we use her for ships, for example.) WALS does define it in terms of agreement, though (and so does Corbett's book). If you call ...

[*] 1.1. English has periphrastic aspect, and what case-marking it has is by suppletion. I wouldn’t call -ing periphrastic. be + participle and have + participle are periphrastic. [*] 1.4. English does not have grammatical gender. It does in pronouns (though I haven’t checked whether WALS considers...