Zompist Bboard Again

I've regained access to the Shopen. His data is mostly European, but he says he's not sure if that's because emphatic coordination of this general sort is less common outside of Europe, or just because his sources for non-European languages don't cover it. He makes this point especially for emphatic...

(Actually I seem to recall that "both... and" is itself a fairly uncommon pattern, something analogous to "and... and" being more widespread, fwiw.)

If I remember right, Haspelmath's chapter on coordination in Volume 2 of Language Typology and Syntactic Description (Shopen, ed) has a discussion of at least "both... and" and "neither... nor", and indicates that having a dedicated "neither... nor" is rare. (But I don'...

Thanks Richard W! Been a long time since I've gotten lost in Sanskrit verbs...

Anyone know of a language or languages with prefixed past tense(s) but suffixed future(s)? (A mood marker that can be used with a future sense would also work. I'm not really bothered if the markers are particles or clitics rather than affixes. I'd be especially interested in any such language that ...

I believe that in the examples I've seen, /ts/ is always across a morpheme boundary. Does that sound possible?

I'm pretty sure it's exactly as you'd probably guess---there's cursing everywhere you might go, but different cultures draw on different domains for their cursing. (Like, if you had to make a guess about the context in which "chalice" and "tabernacle" are curses, you'd probably b...

(I wonder if there's a linguistic term for that, BTW... faux-dialectal spellings like "sez".) Pronunciation spellings? (Kidding.) Another example is the use of "-in'" in place of "-ing" for the verbal ending, encoding more the class or dialect or whatever of the speake...

I've just started looking at Derek Nurse, Tense and Aspect in Bantu. Very interesting! Besides the book itself, people might find its online appendices worth browsing---they give annotated tense/aspect paradigms for over 100 Bantu languages. Here: Appendix One and Appendix Two.

Am I being dense or is this just marked-absolutative ergative agreement? It's not clear that it's agreement at all (see above). But if it's agreement, it's agreement with the P argument, namely the object of a transitive verb, which I guess could be called accusative(-only) agreement, but I'm not s...

In Nuuchahnulth, nouns can take tense affixes, e.g. house+past = 'what used to be a house', grandfather+past = '(my) late grandfather'. But it may be more accurate to say that roots can take both noun-like and verb-like affixes, the 'outermost' ones determining the syntactic class. Do you happen to...

...Oops. s is voiceless, so it's very unlikely that it has its own tone. So when the diagrams show it linked to a low tone, you've got to interpret that as meaning that it tends to lower the pitch of the preceding vowel. But I don't think that changes the results: v́v́s → v́v̀ , and v̀v̀s → v̀v̀ . S...

I'd have thought that genuine TAM marking implied clausal structure, so that any time you have TAM marking on an attributive adjective, you've got a relative clause (since a relative clause is just a clause used attributively). (I don't know anything specific about TAM-marking on nouns. Can these be...

When consecutive morae have the same pitch, it's likely that you've got a single tone linked to both morae. So, for your initial situation, you've likely got something like one of these:   L       H   L  /|\      |\  | μ μ μ     μ μ μ |/  |     |/  | V   s     V   s If you lose the s , the following...

How flexible are the attributive markers? Do they occur only with the descriptive verbs?

Hard to count participles as un-verb-y, though.

You could use temporal adverbs ("once", "formerly") rather than tense marking strictly speaking, otherwise I think you'd need a relative clause of some sort.

Do you mean specifically predicative adjectives, or attributive ones as well?

They're all fine for me; it didn't even occur to me that could be your problem with the first example. ("serve everyone with beer" is at least ambiguous, "serve her with beer" isn't for me, given that it's a pronoun).

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 9:48 am I'd rather expect coda /s/ to give a high tone.

In Chinese it's supposed to have resulted in a 去聲 (falling tone).