Reassessing Noun, Verb, Predicate and Argument

[Frislander]

Hi all,

I haven't been posting here in a far too long while, but the idea for this popped into my head last night and I just had to share something of what I've been thinking about.

So as some IRL context, there's a bit of a debate with some languages families of the world, particularly Salishan, Wakashan and Austronesian, as to the degree to which they can be said to have a salient noun-verb contrast. One of the arguments is that it's generally easy to switch around the "noun" and "verb" in terms of what place they can occupy in the sentence (Wikipedia gives a pair of St’át’imcets examples t’ak tink’yápa "The coyote goes along" and nk’yap tit’áka "the one going along is a coyote"). This is often helped by the fact that there's frequently a relatively strict differentiation between the morphology that occurs with the predicate and with the arguments, but that morphology can generally freely appear with any lexical item.

So what then could an enterprising conlanger use this for? I would suggest that this is an excellent means of turning the predicate-argument contrast into a focus-topic contrast. There's some fairly solid extra-linguistic reasons why this is a sensible move to make. If we acknowledge that there is still in these languages at least a correlation between entities (that which is typically denoted by nouns and pronouns cross-linguistically) and argument position and between events (usually expressed with verbs) and the predicate position, then we can also recognise that there is also a correlation of these roles with topic and focus, respectively. This is because entities, having a more "fixed" presence in the world, are generally better as topics of discussion, while the events surrounding them are generally less likely to be known to us and therefore more appropriate as focus-targets. We even see this idea in English, where a frequent target of focus is a verb ('What did John do last night?' - 'He went partying/ate pasta/killed a man'), as well as in the number of languages where the prototypical focus position is immediately before the verb (I believe Basque and Hungarian are like this?).

But of course, I say "correlation" because this tripartite correlation doesn't always hold, e.g. 'Who went partying last night' - 'John went partying last night'. So it makes sense therefore that in a language with "predicate-argument flexibility" you might use the predicate position as the focus position and the argument position for the topic. You could also fold in an Austronesian or Direct-Inverse argument structure for when you have multiple arguments.

Let's make up so examples with a hypothetical language.

• mete = eye/look
• koro = run
• apa = hit, strike
• baiha = wolf
• mu = who?
• ni = what?
• a = topic/argument/subject marker
• i = oblique
• no = possessive
• reduplication = progressive
• -ta = passive/inverse
• kama = 1SG
• he = 2SG
• -moidu = ought

koro koro a baiha
run run TOP wolf
The wolf is running

ni a koro?
what TOP run
What is that running?

baiha (a koro)
wolf TOP run
That's a wolf running

mete mete a kama i he
look look TOP 1SG OBL 2SG
I'm looking at you

kamamoidu a meteta i he!
1SG-ought TOP look-INV OBL 2SG
You should be looking at me!

mete-apata a kama i he
eye-hit-INV TOP 1SG OBL 2SG
I hit you in the eye

[Ares Land]

Oh, hi! Nice to see you back.

I would suggest that this is an excellent means of turning the predicate-argument contrast into a focus-topic contrast.

That nice bit here is that this is pretty much what natlangs use it for.

You'll find an interesting paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... al_Nahuatl


Tlein quicua.

tle-in

what-the

qui-cua

3.OBJ-eat

What does he eat.

The predicate here is 'tle' (what)

Michin

fish

in

the

qui-cua

gloss=3.OBJ-eat

He eats fish. or, perhaps closer to the original: what he eats is fish.


The predicate here is 'michin' ('fish', 'it is fish')

in is sort of a definite article, but its use in both sentences is really to introduce the argument / topic.
An in both cases, 'what' and 'fish' are the focus.


Nahuatl keeps a clear distinction between nominal and verbal morphology, and generally nouns will stick to nominal morphology and verbs to verbal morphology. (Except that, of course, to perplex the learner, a solid amount of nouns are conjugated verbs: Motēuczōmah 'he frowns like a lord')

[Pabappa]

Im comfortable analyzing my main conlang, Poswa, as lacking parts of speech altogether, although I'll focus on the lack of distinction between nouns and verbs. Rather than having nouns and verbs, or even affixes that create nouns and verbs from ambivalent stems, each word in the language has four stems, which I think of as being like the principal parts of a classical IE verb. I label them A, B, C, and D, roughly in order the most nounlike to the most verblike.

For example, the A-stem is the only stem of the word that can never take a person marker. Yet a bare A-stem can sometimes be found in places where English would only be able to use a verb, and therefore to call it a verb would require positing a zero morpheme that simply changes the word from a noun to a verb, and an explanation for why the word can never appear in this position *without* the zero morph. Likewise, B-stems, C-stems, and D-stems all take person markers, yet often correspond to English nouns, as in the example puppatambo "the road map I'm borrowing".

[Vardelm]

I need to think about something like this for Jin. Although it's not a topic-comment language, I might use similar mechanisms for putting arguments into focus. Also, this could be an interesting direction for descendent languages.

[Imralu]

• mete = eye/look
• koro = run
• apa = hit, strike
• baiha = wolf
• mu = who?
• ni = what?
• a = topic/argument/subject marker
• i = oblique
• no = possessive
• reduplication = progressive
• -ta = passive/inverse
• kama = 1SG
• he = 2SG
• -moidu = ought

If you use mete for both "eye" and "look", how would you differentiate between:

• The big one looks.
• The big one is an eye.
• The eye is big.
• The one who looks is big.