Zompist Bboard Again

Like a lot of non-naturalistic conlangs, mine doesn't distinguish nouns/verbs/adjectives. It does however distinguish patient/agent/receiver (so basically cases) and dynamic/stative ("lay" vs. "lie", "redden" vs. "red" etc.). Now, I'm working on a little book of lessons, so I need some good example words to start with.

I want to explain cases before I explain dynamic/stative, so the first chapters will only contain stative words. But I'm having trouble thinking of words that are transitive without being dynamic. To make it even more difficult, the experiencer role doubles as receiver (aka. dative), which applies to "feeling" words ("love", "happy", "admirer") and generally most involuntary things ("see", "have", "father"), so those are not good examples.

So I need words which
- describe a state, rather than an action or transition
- involve an agent, that is, someone deliberately making something happen
- preferably are fairly basic, so they make sense early in the book

So far I've used "chase" ("the dog chases the cat", classic textbook sentence), which I think works well enough, even if it feels odd to think of it as stative. Now that I think of it, I can also come up with "hold" and "support (financially)". More convoluted constructions include "to keep someone sedated" or "to continue deliberately annoying someone", but they don't sound like beginner words. What other words are there that basically describe someone keeping something in a state?

Can you think of more examples?

Kinship terms? "I mother you" / "i child you" etc? Maybe comparatives too .... "i tall you" == "i'm taller than you".

I've thought about similar things w/ Jin, which makes sense since it's also active-stative. It might be a bit easier for me since the "agent" in transitive statives are what would usually be the object. For "I see you", the "you" pronoun would be the active agent pronoun since it's "causing" you to "see".

AIUI, active-stative languages can have different ways to divide the active vs stative space. There's stative verbs (states) vs dynamic verbs (activities, accomplishments, semelfactives, achievements). You could maybe play with where the dividing line is here, so that your stative verbs consist of states and activities, whereas active verbs are accomplishments, semelfactives, achievements. I'm considering this sort of split for Jin.

There's also volition based, such that only volitional verbs are "active". This could also be combined with the above where volitional activities are "active", while non-volitional activities are "stative".

It's also possible that your stative verbs just don't use the agent in the same way as the active verbs, or perhaps at all.

In the traditional Aktionsart classification of verbs, activity verbs in general might be relevant: to walk, chat, work, search, study, dance. They're not stative but if you can accept "to chase" then maybe these other ones too. They're often intransitive but also have transitive uses in languages: to walk [a dog], to chat [about a topic], to work [on a project], to search [for something], to study [a subject], to dance [a dancing style].

You may or may not consider "to know" as sufficiently agential.

It's hard to think of stative yet agential verbs other than "to hold". Maybe "to cover" might count, and in at least one of their senses, "to illuminate, shine on", "to obscure", "to exemplify, serve as an example of"...

Thanks for your answers!

So predicates are inflected by mood/aspect, of which the most common are state ("be") and transition ("become"), and actors (noun phrases) are inflected by role/case, of which the most common are patient, agent and receiver/experiencer. There is no lexical division in active vs. stative, nor transitive vs. intransitive; any word can be used as either, if you're imaginative enough.

I find that it works pretty well to cram most words into this system, but as with a lot of things in semantics, opinions may differ on what is the most natural way to do that.

But there's a practical difference, because it affects what else we can express with simple inflections. Consider for example "Bob eats". Is Bob agent or patient, and is the eating more of a state or a transition?

Well if Bob is the agent, then the patient is presumably the food, so we can say "Bob eats salad". If Bob is the patient, then the transitive use "Alice eats Bob" would actually mean that she causes him to eat, better translated as "feed". If eating is a state, then the transition form automatically gives us a word for "begin eating", but if it's a transition, then the state form gives us a word for "has (been) eaten".

For words like "run", I'm a little ambivalent, but I think I've settled on the runner being patient and state; thus, you can easily say "Alice ran Bob out of the house", but not "Bob ran a marathon".

For various things that might be considered experiences, where it's not so much that Bob does something, but rather that something has a state in relation to Bob, I've somewhat arbitrarily used the receiver form. So if we say "Bob is warm" with Bob as the patient, it would mean that he has a fever (no pun intended); otherwise, he's the receiver. Apparently some German dialects also do this ("mir ist warm").

That way, the same word can express "Bob knows patience" (state + receiver), "Bob learns patience" (transition + reciever), "Bob teaches patience" (transition + agent). "Patience" is the patient in all those cases (pun totally intended).

I also use that for kinship terms: "Bob is the father of Alice" would have Bob as receiver, even though strictly speaking it was hopefully a deliberate action.

For "I see you", I would also put "I" as the receiver, and "you" as the patient, since neither is really doing it on purpose. Adding an agent would turn the same word into "show".

"To walk a dog" should work, if we think of it as "cause the dog to walk". That's a bit different, since the intransitive version would use the patient role, which... makes it an even better example, I guess?

Stand, seat and sweat? Idk, as nouns they don't describe actions. :/

In "he stands there", we get state but no agent. In "she stood the plant in the window", we get agent but not state. In "he stood for parliament", I guess it works, if we consider parliament to be the patient. As nouns, they (like most nouns) don't have an obvious agent.

Speaking of parliament, words like "serve", "rule", "protect", "oppress", "follow" (literally or metaphorically), they might fit.