Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Aug 03, 2019 5:18 pmBut we already have this concept— we call it zero-derivation. There's absolutely no problem with inflections changing syntactic category— e.g. white > whiten, note > notate, real > realize, heal > health. Zero-derivation just says you don't need an actual inflection.

The problem I see with calling it "zero-derivation" is that that is a type of "derivation" (exactly what KathTheDragon mentioned). Seeing those English examples ("white > whiten"), I now realize you probably don't distinguish the concept of "inflection" from "derivation" (seeing them as synonyms of affixation instead), so Sal and I on one side and you on the other have been talking past each other the whole time.

The distinction is pretty commonly made, even if grammar authors don't often spell it out. Here's a page about it:
http://taalportaal.org/taalportaal/topi ... 3298791594

Trying to put it in your terms, what I'm saying is that I think a distinction is warranted between the type of (derivational) zero-derivation that creates new words (non-productively and with unpredictable meanings) and the type of (inflectional) "zero-derivation" that is a mere grammatical pattern (creating word forms productively and with completely predictable meanings).

Imagine a conlang where saht 'a fork', prototypically a noun both statistically within the conlang and also semantically, can take the form of a verb, saht 'be a fork', because every noun can become a verb meaning "be an X" as part of the grammar. However, the noun can also be said to derive (read: create) a verb through zero-derivation: saht 'poke through [solid food while cooking to test if it's soft enough] (transitive)'. In Sal's terms, we'd say 'a fork' and 'be a fork' are different morphosyntactic words but the same lexical word, but 'a fork' and 'poke through [food]' are both different morphosyntactic words and also different lexical words.

Also, Salmoneus gave examples of an imagined isolating language, but this can equally apply to languages with surface affixes. For example, Old French amer 'to love' inflects into the participle amant 'loving [sb]', but unpredictably also derives the noun amant 'lover'. Meanwhile, trover 'to find [sth]' only has the participle inflection trovant 'finding [sth]', with no unpredictably derived noun *trovant like the one amer produces.

Now, you could totally talk about roots that aren't specified for syntactic category— in English, Mandarin, Quechua, or (as I showed above) Latin. But I don't see the need to decide that they belong to a "noun-y lexical class", and I don't see a principled way to decide what class that is. Sometimes it's clear etymologically, but etymology is not accessible to most speakers.

Neither Salmoneus nor I have said anything about categorizing roots into word classes (and I suspect the two of us would agree with you that it's not reasonable). I think your comments about roots come from Salmoneus giving examples from an imagined isolating language where roots are also actual words, but the focus is on the actual words, not the roots.

As I said, if you think in terms of prototypes, the traditional definitions make more sense. You can use syntax alone, abstractly, to define syntactic categories, but deciding which ones to call "nouns" and which are "verbs" is basically semantic.

The Latin gerund is very noun-like [...] Seeing it skirts the word classes of Latin as it does, we could probably consider the Latin gerund to be morphosyntactically noun-like while still belonging to the Verb Lexical Class.

Or we admit that categories are not absolute but fuzzy.

Yes, but this only means there is no hard absolute rule that can apply to all languages. Identifying word classes is usually very useful.

E.g., in Mandarin, "adjectives" don't pattern like nouns, but like verbs— they can take adverbials, they can be perfective. And "verbs" can be used in comparative constructions. (There may be something that distinguishes verbs from adjectives, but I can't think of it offhand.)

I think there are two differences between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin:

1. Unlike most verbs, they cannot be perfective, or take any aspect particle at all. (You might be thinking of being able to take the sentence-final particle 了 le, which most of the time expresses change of state. This has a different etymology* and meaning than the perfective particle 了 le.)

2. The semantic effects of negation with 不 bu4 and 沒(有) mei2(you3) are different.
- - - When modifying verbs, 不 bu4 is the default unmarked negator for verbs with present-tense meaning ("doesn't do"), and for verbs with past-tense meaning it expresses the subject didn't do the action intentionally ("didn't do on purpose").
- - - When modifying adjectives, 不 bu4 is the default unmarked negator regardless of semantic tense.
- - - When modifying verbs, 沒(有) mei2(you3) is the default unmarked negator for verbs with past-tense meaning ("didn't do, hadn't done"), but for verbs in the present tense it makes it clear that there is an expectation the subject will do the pending action in the future even though they haven't done it yet ("hasn't (yet) done") (for present-tense verbs it is usually accompanied by 還 hai2 'still').
- - - When modifying adjectives, 沒(有) is a dynamic negator regardless of semantic tense ("hasn't gotten [adjective], hadn't become [adjective]"). EDIT: But much more commonly, it is accompanied by the adverbs 這麼 zhe4me 'like this' or 那麼 na4me 'like that' to express negated comparison of equality: 沒有那麼累 mei2you3 na4me lei4 'to be not that tired'.

* The perfective particle comes from the verb 了 'to complete' (as a verb it survives into modern Mandarin with the pronunciation liao3). The sentence-final particle comes from 來 'to come' (surviving as a verb with the pronunciation lai2), in fact, some northern Mandarin dialects still have 來著 laizhe as a synonym particle.

Ser wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2019 4:08 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Aug 03, 2019 5:18 pmBut we already have this concept— we call it zero-derivation. There's absolutely no problem with inflections changing syntactic category— e.g. white > whiten, note > notate, real > realize, heal > health. Zero-derivation just says you don't need an actual inflection.

The problem I see with calling it "zero-derivation" is that that is a type of "derivation" (exactly what KathTheDragon mentioned). Seeing those English examples ("white > whiten"), I now realize you probably don't distinguish the concept of "inflection" from "derivation" (seeing them as synonyms of affixation instead), so Sal and I on one side and you on the other have been talking past each other the whole time.

The distinction is pretty commonly made, even if grammar authors don't often spell it out. Here's a page about it:
http://taalportaal.org/taalportaal/topi ... 3298791594

I'm happy to distinguish inflectional and derivational morphology, though I'd also endorse that page's statement that "in many respects inflection and derivation form a continuum, and therefore there is no sharp functional distinction between the two."

However, this doesn't seem to make sense of your earlier comments, e.g.

If such a language allows every and any semantically noun-y word (people, places, things) to be both a syntactic noun "X" and a syntactic verb meaning "be an X, be the X", why should the syntactic verb be considered a derived separate word at all, instead of an inflection of sorts? Rather, you could talk about a Noun-y Lexical Class that when used in a particular sentence is either a (Morpho)Syntactic Noun or a (Morpho)Syntactic Verb.

If you're making a hard distinction between inflection and derivation, where only the latter changes syntactic category, I can't make sense of the idea that this "syntactic verb" is formed from a noun by inflection.

Trying to put it in your terms, what I'm saying is that I think a distinction is warranted between the type of (derivational) zero-derivation that creates new words (non-productively and with unpredictable meanings) and the type of (inflectional) "zero-derivation" that is a mere grammatical pattern (creating word forms productively and with completely predictable meanings).

Imagine a conlang where saht 'a fork', prototypically a noun both statistically within the conlang and also semantically, can take the form of a verb, saht 'be a fork', because every noun can become a verb meaning "be an X" as part of the grammar. However, the noun can also be said to derive (read: create) a verb through zero-derivation: saht 'poke through [solid food while cooking to test if it's soft enough] (transitive)'. In Sal's terms, we'd say 'a fork' and 'be a fork' are different morphosyntactic words but the same lexical word, but 'a fork' and 'poke through [food]' are both different morphosyntactic words and also different lexical words.

I don't have any problem with analyzing processes in terms of productivity. Well, I'd throw in the caveat that when we make statements like "every noun can become a verb meaning 'be an X'", we're probably thinking in prototypes, and the generalization is probably far from true. "Be a fork", fine, but is there also "be a destruction", "be a harmony", "be a greenness"?

I don't see the gain in calling some of these "lexical words". Mac's idea of polysemy seems most helpful here. Lexicographers would just list "poke through" as one of the senses of saht. But lexicographers can also be pedantic and state things that don't need stating, so they might also list "be a fork" as a sense. (In English, it bugs me that dictionaries often include a sense for a noun X of "something that looks like an X". But maybe they would retort that linguists see universal rules where speakers don't necessarily do so...)

So, I'm happy to agree that some category-changing processes are highly productive. The participle example is good, but I don't think it shows that "be a fork" is an "inflection" rather than a "derivation". Rather, it shows that there's a fuzzy intersection between these concepts. Participles themselves are fuzzy, behaving sometimes like verbs, sometimes like adjectives, sometimes like nouns.

1. Unlike most verbs, they cannot be perfective, or take any aspect particle at all. (You might be thinking of being able to take the sentence-final particle 了 le, which most of the time expresses change of state. This has a different etymology* and meaning than the perfective particle 了 le.)

I should have said "perfect". But that is an aspect.

Thanks for the info on adjectives in Mandarin!

Ser wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2019 4:08 pm I think there are two differences between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin:

Do these criteria distinguish adjectives from a verb (assuming it's really a verb) like xǐhuān 喜歡 like?

statelessnation wrote: ↑Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:36 am In languages with case which are both Ergative-Absolutive and Secundative, does the role of a 'Donor' typically get marked in the Ergative case or do they typically show it some other way?

Subject: Linguistic Miscellany Thread

statelessnation wrote: ↑Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:36 am In languages with case which are both Ergative-Absolutive and Secundative, does the role of a 'Donor' typically get marked in the Ergative case or do they typically show it some other way?

statelessnation wrote: ↑Thu Jul 19, 2018 11:36 am In languages with case which are both Ergative-Absolutive and Secundative, does the role of a 'Donor' typically get marked in the Ergative case or do they typically show it some other way?

Can you give us some examples of such languages?

https://wals.info/combinations/105A_98A#2/-9.8/154.3
Secondary-object construction / Ergative - absolutive
Wardaman
Coos (Hanis)
Gooniyandi
Ngiyambaa
Greenlandic (West)

https://wals.info/combinations/105A_99A#2/23.1/153.0
Secondary-object construction / Ergative - absolutive
Wardaman
Gooniyandi
Chamorro

https://wals.info/combinations/105A_100A#2/65.4/144.5
Secondary-object construction / Ergative
Chamorro

I can’t tell, really, how these languages treat the Donor/Exhibitor/Narrator. At least not easily or quickly or directly, from the information in WALS.info.

A friend of mine is looking for examples of languages with no number distinction in 3P personal pronouns. I feel dumb that I can't think of any.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:17 am A friend of mine is looking for examples of languages with no number distinction in 3P personal pronouns. I feel dumb that I can't think of any.

WALS lists Burmese, Canela-Krahô, Cocopa, Imonda, Kiowa, Maricopa, Oneida, Pirahã, and Qawasqar.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:26 am

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:17 am A friend of mine is looking for examples of languages with no number distinction in 3P personal pronouns. I feel dumb that I can't think of any.

WALS lists Burmese, Canela-Krahô, Cocopa, Imonda, Kiowa, Maricopa, Oneida, Pirahã, and Qawasqar.

According to Wikipedia, Burmese has a plural particle (တို့ tui., colloquial ဒို့ dui) appended to personal pronouns. (This is part of the reason why I don't trust WALS in these matters.) I suspect in practice it's like other SEA and EA languages that avoid 3P pronouns in favour of honorifics/names.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:03 am According to Wikipedia, Burmese has a plural particle (တို့ tui., colloquial ဒို့ dui) appended to personal pronouns. (This is part of the reason why I don't trust WALS in these matters.) I suspect in practice it's like other SEA and EA languages that avoid 3P pronouns in favour of honorifics/names.

Ugh. Wouldn't have thought there'd be much room for judgment calls on that one.

Come to think of it, classical Chinese has no number distinctions in pronouns.

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:11 amCome to think of it, classical Chinese has no number distinctions in pronouns.

I didn't think Classical Chinese even had 3P subject pronouns.

Does Thai have a number distinction in its 3P personal pronouns?

Vijay wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:25 amDoes Thai have a number distinction in its 3P personal pronouns?

Quoth Wikipedia: "Plural pronouns can be easily constructed by adding the word พวก (puak) in front of a singular pronoun as in พวกเขา (puak khao) meaning they or พวกเธอ (puak thoe) meaning the plural sense of you."

Korean technically doesn't have 3P personal pronouns either; like Classical Chinese, it substitutes a demonstrative (in the rare instances where a title/kinship term/personal name/etc. is not used). But it also has a plural particle 들 /tul/ which can appear almost anywhere in the sentence to indicate a plural subject.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:16 am

akam chinjir wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:11 amCome to think of it, classical Chinese has no number distinctions in pronouns.

I didn't think Classical Chinese even had 3P subject pronouns.

It doesn't, but there's always 之. (Plus I already managed to forget we were just talking about 3p.)

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:38 am

Vijay wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:25 amDoes Thai have a number distinction in its 3P personal pronouns?

Quoth Wikipedia: "Plural pronouns can be easily constructed by adding the word พวก (puak) in front of a singular pronoun as in พวกเขา (puak khao) meaning they or พวกเธอ (puak thoe) meaning the plural sense of you."

That's a disambiguation strategy, though, not actual pronouns. I think a lot of (if not most) Indo-Aryan languages are the same (Hindi doesn't even have any exclusively plural pronouns in any person). Even Turkish is kind of like that. You don't indicate plurality in any of these languages unless you have to specify for some reason that you're talking about more than one entity instead of just one.

Malayalam has singular 'they', though only when referring to humans as far as I know. There are pronouns that are used only for plural non-humans, but they're not used very often IME. So I'm not sure whether Malayalam really has a number distinction in 3rd person, either.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 9:17 am A friend of mine is looking for examples of languages with no number distinction in 3P personal pronouns. I feel dumb that I can't think of any.

Maxakali, Axininca, debatably Imonda (edit: also Tairora - check the book below for more)

edit: can't have a number distinction in 3 if you don't have pronouns in 3

The independent pronouns of the American language Acoma Keresan are a case where the extension into the non-singular pronouns does not seem possible. The Acoma pronouns only distinguish two forms: hínum'é and his'um'é. These two words are strictly used to mark speaker and addressee. They can not be used for ‘we’ or‘you-plural’ respectively. This pronominal paradigm only consists of two elements, the rest of the categories are non-existing (Maring, 1967: 43-44, 113-114). A different, and more common, situation is found in Salt-Yui, a non-Austronesian language from Papua new Guinea. Just as in Acoma, there are only two independent pronouns. In Salt-Yui, the two pronouns are na and ni. These pronouns are used for speaker and addressee reference. There is no third person pronoun; other linguistic material is used to mark this function. Also, there is no number distinction in this pronominal paradigm.

https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_40 ... 2001_s.pdf

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 10:38 am Quoth Wikipedia: "Plural pronouns can be easily constructed by adding the word พวก (puak) in front of a singular pronoun as in พวกเขา (puak khao) meaning they or พวกเธอ (puak thoe) meaning the plural sense of you."

The mix of transliterations grated so badly that I've just fixed it in the article.

In English we have the verb "feed" meaning to give someone food, but we don't have a word meaning to give someone a beverage. We have the verb "water" that we use for plants, but we don't use "water" for people.

Space60 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 9:48 amIn English we have the verb "feed" meaning to give someone food, but we don't have a word meaning to give someone a beverage.

Etymologically, the parallel expression would be "drench".

ObMisc: I grew up near a town called "Fenton" and it only dawned on me within the past hour that this is literally "Fen Town".

Relatedly, I googled "Fenton" to found out what the town's ancestral namesake was. Among the many eponymous villages in England, my favourite has got to be the parish of "Pidley cum Fenton" in Cambridgeshire.

While we're on placename etymologies, we should give a shout-out to the jingoists in Meiji Japan who decided that Ainu placenames should be given Sino-Japanese etymologies. For example: Sapporo, which quite sensibly means "dry place" in Ainu, is "a canopy of little slips of paper" when read literally in kanji. Some others were more successful. Nupurpet ("dark river") becomes noboribetsu, which could be charitably translated as "branching mountain path." Esausi, ("cape") becomes Esashi, a "joy of twigs." These aren't just Mandarin-style attempts to render Ainu names phonetically; in older maps Ainu placenames were rendered in katakana, marking them as phonetic transcriptions of non-Japanese words. The current kanji are a deliberate attempt to create Japanese etymologies for these names. So maybe the lesson for conlangers is, if your con-empire absorbs a subject people, perhaps there should be a peripheral edge to their territory where all the villages have ludicrous names like "euphoric hedgehog biscuit" or "upside down salmon bucket."

Toponyms are also a terrific opportunity for folk etymology. The USA has such colourful examples as Lapittabi (Choctaw "kills-bucks") > Lappatubby or P'tuck-sepo (Munsee "crooked river") > Tuxedo.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 2:12 pm While we're on placename etymologies, we should give a shout-out to the jingoists in Meiji Japan who decided that Ainu placenames should be given Sino-Japanese etymologies. For example: Sapporo, which quite sensibly means "dry place" in Ainu, is "a canopy of little slips of paper" when read literally in kanji. Some others were more successful. Nupurpet ("dark river") becomes noboribetsu, which could be charitably translated as "branching mountain path." Esausi, ("cape") becomes Esashi, a "joy of twigs." These aren't just Mandarin-style attempts to render Ainu names phonetically; in older maps Ainu placenames were rendered in katakana, marking them as phonetic transcriptions of non-Japanese words. The current kanji are a deliberate attempt to create Japanese etymologies for these names. So maybe the lesson for conlangers is, if your con-empire absorbs a subject people, perhaps there should be a peripheral edge to their territory where all the villages have ludicrous names like "euphoric hedgehog biscuit" or "upside down salmon bucket."

Ziwan Zzytwqn'yelp /ndz45 wan33 ye45 l22/ "euphoric hedgehog biscuit" < Rau Zramishd [zʁɔ̃miʃɨ̆r] "dry place"
Ziwan Nypnyuhztyewqxssyx /ny22 nywu33 he45 ye45 wa42 s42/ "upside-down salmon bucket" < Rau ngzumhbal [ŋndzʏ̃w̃xβaɬ] "fox hill"