Zompist Bboard Again

Hey, thanks!

Firstly, how common is it to have a phonology with /x/, but no /h/? What about a [x~h] morpheme with realisation dependent on position? This is normal; a prominent example is Mandarin. (Admittedly you won't go far with the assumption that if it happens in Mandarin phonology then it must be normal.)...

Telicity, aspect, applicatives, focus... I've been trying to mull through some things, and I figure I'll post about some of it, even though it's pretty inconclusive, and even though I'm probably still misunderstanding most of this stuff. (I'll still do my best to sound like I know what I'm talking ...

Isn't that exactly what the English experiential perfect is? Cf. "I've been to a town." It's a bit tricky: "I've been to a town" is an experiential perfect but "I've gone to a town" is a perfect of resulting state. But maybe it's only with "go" that you get t...

Thank you for your thoughts, they are greatly appreciated! However, if you don't mind, I am going to park a response for now: I want to get the whole of the verb system on paper first and then go back and start attempting to analyse the syntactic structures in depth (for one thing, I need to find/d...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sat Mar 16, 2019 8:25 am (although one of the ones listed is 'chez', which even to this non-French speaker seems to govern the genitive now)

Pretty sure "chez" gets the tonic pronouns ("chez moi").

What I mean is a natlang that has no morphological case, but has an ergative-absolutive syntax. I don't need a natlang resource for person and gender stuff with ergatives; I don't care if the natlang uses those agreements or not. Well, I'm pretty sure syntactic ergativity (if you're thinking about ...

I'm going to make it a caseless ergative-absolutive language that tends to be isolating but uses person and gender agreement in nouns and adjectives. Anyone good examples of ergative-absolutive natlangs without case? You mean with ergative agreement? Here's a paper I liked about those: Ellen Woolfo...

(An irritant with TreeForm is that it doesn't really do the drawing lines for transformations at all well.) (This is more or less exactly why I asked, I was hoping for something that shows movement a bit better and with a bit more flexibility) What you’re saying makes sense to me, but I’m writing t...

First, quickly---are you using TreeForm for the diagrams? And what's CP in this context? Second, maybe a bit more involved. Am I right to think that in a patient voice clause, the patient would end up in the same spot as the agent does in the first tree and the oblique does in the second one? That l...

Do you have any examples of languages which do this? I haven't come across any so far. You could look this paper ---it's about a Bantu language named Ruwund, but starts with a bunch of references. Hungarian is supposed to be another example. There are also case-marking languages in which direct obj...

Just to add a bit to what Sal said, a complication that's relevant to polypersonal agreement is that in plenty of languages with object agreement, you don't get agreement with all objects. Typically this is related to the specificity, animacy, singularity, &c, of the object (there are different ...

Actually not. Sure that there is no such thing as Obviate SAP, but that's because in all languages, SAP is the most proximate of anything. It would be unnatural if there is any 3rd person argument that is somehow more proximate than SAP. I think it would be more common to say that there's an animac...

In Cantonese you get cases of hypercorrection where ŋ gets inserted before a word-initial vowel (reacting to the widespread loss of initial ŋ). Didn't know there were cases of genuine epenthesis.

Assume that we have an agglutinative language with polypersonal agreement and a transitive copula. Do you know of any languages that do that? You could look into what they do, if there are any. (My amateur brain thinks about this sort of thing in quite a different way. Like, in "I am happy,&qu...

Akangka wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2019 12:17 am I mean /*ɰ/ turns to current /w/, so it appears that /w/ turns into /ŋ/ while diachronically, it's actually /*ɰ/ turns into /ŋ/ when nasalized, but /w/ elsewhere.

Okay, I can see how that would work, but I actually like [w̃] and would prefer to keep it, my worry is about [ʋ̃].

But I've got /ʋ/, not /ɰ/. (I do have ŋʷ though.)

If I've got progressive nasal harmony, and among the consonants that this can affect are ʋ and w, and the language also has m, how likely is it that ʋ̃ will be/remain phonologically/phonetically distinct?

Pabappa . I wonder how much of my trouble grasping the glosses comes from my ignorance about Poswa, and how much from the fact it's supposed to be baby talk :) One particular question: the morpheme glossed TR in bamambabo , I'm curious what exactly it does. Is it some kind of applicative? Does it h...

I'd guess your best bet is a phonology textbook. Maybe Hayes, Introductory Phonology ? I've mostly picked things up here and there over the years, so I don't have a strong opinion about textbooks. I did just read through Bale and Reiss, Phonology: A Formal Introduction , which I got a lot out of; it...