Zompist Bboard Again

(E.g. it's rather misleading to say that either French or German is simply SVO. I'd managed to forget how WALS fumbles German. A related data point, Italian is also often analysed as VSO, at least a lot of the time, and some people have analysed Spanish that way too, I'm pretty sure. More reasons t...

Do you know WALS ? It can get pretty unreliable, but for quite a range of things it can give you a sense of what some of the options are. Generally speaking, learning about various options is likely to help you more than just learning that certain things are a bit SAE-y. Like, I think you'll benefit...

And a question: how do you tell the difference between verbal agreement and a clitic pronoun? Surely they would be very similar.) Normally the difference is that: (a) clitics are less phonologically integrated with their hosts than affixes (b) clitics normally alternate (i.e you don't see both clit...

the last section of this post , where ergative can be marked in two (or more) ways, each having different semantics or pragmatics (my list there includes agentivity, focus, social expectation and personal relevance as possible meanings, along with differential marking based on O). Ah, I'll definite...

I had assumed that differential subject marking was a general category of phenomena in which the subject can be marked in multiple different ways, encompassing both optional ergative marking and the presence of multiple ergative markers. Is this definition of DSM incorrect? To be honest I'm not sur...

You did mention this before , so I am aware of it. But I’m surprised by your statement that ‘DSM conditioned by … the subject is a lot rarer’: from what I’ve seen, this sort of DSM is just as common, if not more common. To clarify, are you including optional ergative marking (where it is common for...

Does this correlate with differences in unmarked word order? I don't remember if there are any Mayan languages which are a bit more SVO / less V-initial. Not sure if it'd be strictly unmarked, though presumably there are a lot more preverbal subjects if continuing topics are also regularly fronted,...

This is so good.

(Maybe I'll come up with something more constructive to say tomorrow, when I should have time to finish reading, but for now, about halfway through, all I've got is praise.)

IIRC, many Mayan languages have both (new/contrastive) topic and focus fronting, but when both occur the order is strictly TOPIC FOCUS VERB OTHER. I remembered the Mayan order being the opposite (and said so earlier), but I've gone and checked, and you have it right. I checked Aissen, Topic and Foc...

I believe generics can be topics in all languages, but languages differ in whether they're marked like indefinites (English) or definites (Spanish, as zompist said). In languages without definite articles, they can also be unmarked for definiteness. I've seen these labelled as external vs internal ...

where there's an overt topic marker that can be used without movement. Quechua. The topic marker -qa can be appended to anything and does not trigger movement. Awesome! Thanks. I'll add one point about focus. Sometimes when people talk about focus (or emphasis), what they have in mind is an especia...

That was really great, chris_notts. I'm going to highlight/add some things that have tripped me up in the past (and that I hope I now understand well enough!). Regarding the "pizza" example, my impression is that it's generally true that generics pattern with definites in getting used as t...

Thanks akam chinjir! I’m not sure I understand most of this, mainly because I still don’t really understand unergative/unaccusative verbs (I’ll have to reread the previous discussion, since I wasn’t really following it all that closely), but I definitely agree that active/stative alignments are a g...

Well, do you have any example of a syntactic rule which can’t be framed in those terms? (Not trying to criticise your argument; I’m genuinely curious in a counterexample.) [...] I always thought that it was only O and S arguments that can be incorporated, which fits perfectly in terms of Dixon’s th...

[Theoretical models] are sometimes suggested on the basis of data in a very limited set of languages, but are then put forth as general accounts of how all human languages operate. When unexpected data from new languages come to notice there can be a number of reactions: ignore it; reinterpret the ...

If you start with just a low and a high, you can get falling by having the high tone spread to the right and merge with a low tone in the next syllable; and you can get rising tone by dropping coda ʔ after a low tone. You can also get both by losing peripheral vowels while preserving their tone. I g...

I take it that if you do have an S=O ambitransitive, the fact that it's S=O is a pretty good indication that it's unaccusative in its intransitive use. And for good reason, an unaccusative verb is one whose single argument is like the object of a transitive verb. Literally, in relational grammar, wh...

I was trying to do a translation of "The North Wind and the Sun" for Pñæk, and I'm still unhappy with my translation of this sentence: Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him Correlative clauses could w...

That's awesome.