Re: a-Uttes: a touch of alien semantics
Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2021 7:41 am
Oh, good! I’d hate to see you typecast.
So a verb can have, say, 10 core arguments? How would that work?
In that case, how do you assign the animacy of a verb like ‘eat’ or ‘punch’ or ‘go’ or ‘roll’? I’m not quite sure what semantic feature you would base that on.Predicate animacy.
Most languages have valency or transitivity. A-Uttes, as we've seen, doesn't use these categories.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't have categories of its own.
To recap a bit: a) content words are either animate or inanimate and b) any content word can be used as a predicate.
This means that predicate are animate or inanimate too!
How exactly do you define ‘object’ here? Your ‘Object Case’ seems to mark all core arguments, so does just one argument agree with the verb — in which case, which is the agreeing argument? — or do all arguments agree?
Sure!
Actions are indeed inanimate.In that case, how do you assign the animacy of a verb like ‘eat’ or ‘punch’ or ‘go’ or ‘roll’? I’m not quite sure what semantic feature you would base that on.
All arguments in the Object case must agree. If one of the arguments is animate and the predicate is inanimate, then that argument must take another case.
For some reason, that makes a TON of sense to me and makes serial verbs a bit less muddy. I don't know if "serial verbs" are exactly what you're thinking of here (are they???), but this 1 bit was super helpful for me, so thanks!
It may be worth noting that this is only one of several types of serialisation. Specifically, this is what Crowley calls ‘ambient’ serialization. A natlang example from North-East Ambae (Hyslop 2001):Vardelm wrote: ↑Wed Jun 23, 2021 8:38 am I want to get back & read the post more closely, but from a quick scan this jumped out:
For some reason, that makes a TON of sense to me and makes serial verbs a bit less muddy. I don't know if "serial verbs" are exactly what you're thinking of here (are they???), but this 1 bit was super helpful for me, so thanks!
I'm surprised, but happy it helps! (That's inspired by serial verb constructions but not necessarily intended to be naturalistic.)