Zompist Bboard Again

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Sat Apr 04, 2020 6:54 am @akam chinjir: You're lucky. Here in Réunion, with 4% of the population of Taiwan, there were 17 new cases yesterday.

Definitely, I'm in maybe the only country in the world where the people in charge immediately listened to doctors in Wuhan and not to Chinese officials or the WHO.

Ugh, one new case of local transmission today (out of seven new cases).

About the Taiwan comparison, one thing that's distinctive here is that the government has apparently been very successful at stopping the virus at the border. (I haven't been keeping notes, but I remember just one case in the last week or so of someone who caught it here and isn't assumed to have ca...

I imagine verbs of consumption could end up being quite interesting here---given that the person eating is both acting and being affected, and it's pretty common to want to emphasise the affectedness (e.g. "I ate" uttered with the implicature that I'm not hungry now). Edit : Like, with EAT...

I don't know what Mark Baker says in what you read, but maybe he skipped medieval Western Romance and historical Semitic in his data, and funnily it turns out those are the most of the languages with case I happen to be somewhat familiar with... He's got a bit of a balancing act---for the things he...

(In Dyirbal in particular there's some reason to think that in transitive sentences it's the P argument that's in the position of the structural subject, with the A argument taking what's otherwise an oblique case marker, something like a passive even in synchronic grammar.) This sounds like a pret...

I’m not sure how you could get ergative from genitive via nominalisation — could you elaborate? As for instrumental to ergative, I don’t think I’ve heard of that happening via passives; Dixon writes that it could come from sentences such as John opened the door with the key vs The key opened the do...

Partially responding to both bradrn and Ser: I can't remember details, but I'm pretty sure Baker, in his book on case, reports that ACC/GEN syncretism is rare enough that he thinks this warrants one kind of explanation. I can't remember if he mentions any cases where it does happen. He certainly wou...

I agree also with Ser, this looks more like a NOM/ACC pattern in which there are two cases available for S=A subjects. With just these examples you could relabel ERG as NOM, ABS as DAT, and OBL as ACC, and I think it'd all go through (and correspond to your semantic summary pretty well). I’d be cur...

I agree also with Ser, this looks more like a NOM/ACC pattern in which there are two cases available for S=A subjects. With just these examples you could relabel ERG as NOM, ABS as DAT, and OBL as ACC, and I think it'd all go through (and correspond to your semantic summary pretty well). I actually ...

Cannabis stores actually are classed as essential in Canada, I think. (https://www.thestar.com/news/2020/03/27 ... break.html.)

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Mar 30, 2020 3:42 am Is ‘heads’ a typo here?

I was going for the reading "struck another man over [the head with a guitar]"---as opposed to the head without the guitar.

I have to really force out the "... attacking [victim in bed with guitar]" reading. "... attacking [victim in bed] with guitar" is the only natural one for me. Maybe "...attacking victim in [bed with guitar]"? Like, there are two beds, and only one of them has a guitar...

I put in an Akiatu sentence, it guessed Japanese, and tried to guess what I really meant to type (but had no translation for either version of the sentence, of course).

Thanks! I don't know where I got that bad and inaccurate of an impression about case in ergative languages then. I actually don't know how reliable those WALS chapters are. In particular, I know in at least some cases (including Selayarese), the absolutive agreement bits have been argued to be clit...

The vast, vast majority of ergative languages uses nominal case [...] Selayarese has an ergative agreement pattern, and no case marking. So do the Mayan languages. WALS reports 19 out of 380 languages in that chapter's sample having ergative agreement, and 32 out of 190 in that chapter's sample hav...

grænt + PL = grænts dæns + PL = dænsɨz bræntʃ + PL = bræntʃɨz flændʒ + PL = flændʒɨz But bæθs , not bæthɨz , dwɔrfs or dwɔrvz but not drwɔrvɨz ---your examples here show strident affricates patterning with strident fricatives, and not with non-strident ones---which is to say, as strident, not as fr...

In human languages at least, affricates often pattern as plosives, and some think that they simply are plosives; like ts is a coronal strident plosive (contrasting with nonstrident t ). I think there are supposed to be languages in which they pattern with fricatives on their right hand side only, bu...

That reminds me of Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , and specifically his discussion of trajectories. [...] Yeah, that seems right. I've seen the word "path" used with about the same sense. I think I'd count paths/trajectories, as well as destinations, as results, though the re...

The constructions in (3) and (4) look resultative to me. As in, the balloon went, and as a result it was high; the blow sent him flying, and as a result he was far (away). The fact that "far" is fine though you'd need "far away" in a regular predication maybe suggests these are n...