Zompist Bboard Again

The Noonan article I linked is probably more useful than anything I can come up with, but here are some thoughts. One thing is that I'm really never sure what to do with interrogative complements, like in "I asked what you did last summer." I don't know if I've never read anything useful a...

No, it isn’t. It only becomes a nominalisation when of is included. This point is a bit subtle, but Dixon notes that The playing of the national anthem is acceptable, while *The playing the national anthem isn’t. You can also use adjectives with the one but not the other, e.g. The impressive playin...

That looks like an excellent source; how can I get access? I’ve been referring to the book Complementation by Dixon and Aikhenvald (henceforth referred to as ‘Dixon’), which is also pretty good — but oddly enough, it doesn’t have anything on how to form complement clauses. lib-sci seems to have it ...

William Annis has reposted his Conlanger's Thesaurus, with some updates, the biggest one of which is that the PDF is now searchable.

I know of at least five strategies to mark complement clauses: [...] Aside from these, are there any other strategies used? I liked Michael Noonan's chapter on Complementation in Language Typology and Syntactic Description . One thing you don't seem to mention is verb-deranking---e.g., allowing a s...

Xwtek wrote: ↑Thu Jan 16, 2020 2:49 am Bilabialized bilabial consonant? How is anyone supposed to pronounce it? Did you actually mean Labiovelarized consonant?

I expect it means with lip rounding, though it wouldn't be a surprise if they're also velarised.

I wouldn't have thought nested topics was even a little bit weird.

Looking at it a bit more carefully, I'm starting to share your puzzlement---he really ought to tie the two discussions better. (But I haven't had time to look at the tense stuff at all carefully, I could easily be missing something.) A system like the ones he describes for Semitic languages might be...

I do have another question about aspect now — hopefully simpler than my previous one. How common is a tripartite present/past perfect/past imperfective aspectual system outside Europe? Dahl (1985) suggests that this is common in general (‘There is a strong tendency for PFV categories to be restrict...

To me, 1 and 2 mean the same, and 3 and 4 mean the same. :P My judgments are closest to Vijay's. I think for me there's an informational difference: you'd be more likely to use (1) if you were focusing the bulls' activity, (2) if you were supplying background for something else you wanted to mentio...

Continuing here a thread from the Conlang fluency thread. I have no idea how the author of Kelen reacts to this kind of comment though, but it has been made for a long time... I imagine she reacts negatively to it, and insists her no-verb analysis is correct. I personally don't see what the problem ...

This is exactly what I do as well! Although I would note that every time I try, I end up making the protolanguage so complicated that I never end up making any descencents… make sure you don’t fall into that trap! Me too, I'm not sure I've ever made substantial progress on anything that wasn't prim...

Are there any languages in which indirect objects can be expressed without using an adpositional phrase? Are there any languages in which indirect objects rarely or never use an adpositional phrase? I have nothing to say about serial verbs :) Here I'll add a footnote to Ser, a pattern I particularl...

It's not really the same as a passive since the case of the retained argument isn't changed. Unless you want to say that (in English) "I ate" is the antipassive of "I ate the food"? I don't think I've seen passivisation defined in terms of case that way. You don't think it's pos...

I realized recently in the Linguistic Miscellany thread that I don't really understand ergativity, but wouldn't this typically just be the bare active-voice verb with an absolutive argument? someone.ERG steal.PAST.ACTIVE object.ABS the 'Someone stole the object.' object.ABS the steal.PAST.ACTIVE 'T...

Another question (not interrogatives this time!): Apparently the passive is very rare in ergative-absolutive languages, which prefer the antipassive instead. In ergative languages which have no passive, how can a passive sentence like ‘The object was stolen’ be represented? I believe one option is ...

I'm not sure. Apparently it's pretty common to have where but not when (as morphologically simple forms), I definitely don't know why that is.

Here's another paper on interrogative words, Cysouw, Interrogative words . It agrees about the who/what distinction, even in languages that don't otherwise have an animacy distinction in their pronouns. It seems to be very rare to innovate new question words other than by adding something to an exis...

[...]Of course, you see the same effects with unexpectedly topical Ps, but I get the feeling that non-topical A effects may be more pervasive, even though the realisations vary from stress to word order changes to clefts to voice morphology and discourse structuring. That's all really interesting, ...

In some Mayan languages it's an issue with respect to complement and purpose clauses as well, not just relative clauses. And famously with transitive subject extraction for focus as well. But I think it's not unusual to single out A for pragmatic restrictions even in non-ergative languages. Oh, for...