Zompist Bboard Again

I looked through this briefly, but I can’t find anything relating optional ergative marking to differential object marking, like you said. Which page(s) were you thinking about? When she talks about "object shift," that's the connection. Here's the background idea, as I understand it. The...

I like this way of looking at it. Your Dyirbal example is particularly interesting; what sort of ‘modifiers’ are you talking about? It seems to occur at least with relative clauses, noun class markers, and adjectives; you can see some examples on pp.8-9 of Legate, Dyirbal ergativity . That’s pretty...

Fwiw, there's at least one language, Suyá, that's supposed to have erg/abs pronouns but nom/acc common nouns (in future and negative clauses). ( https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.89.07gil .) Some linguists argue that systems with NP splits should be understood as tripartite, but with syncretism, e.g...

No particular language, though it's not a coincidence that it starts with AKA.

I vacillate between something like [ʌˈkɑm] and something like [ʌˈkɑ̃], and think I have [tʃɪˈndʒir], or would, if I were better at trilling. (The syllabic affiliation of the /n/ is a bit subtle; it's definitely not place-assimilated.)

It looks like Akam meant 士 as "man", but I used the more common sense of 'scholar'. I was really stretching there---thinking of 士 as someone with a position, or anyway of the right social status to hold a position, which was a bit suggested by some glosses/examples I found for "adam&...

I think my favourite part in mine was finding what I still think is a pretty ideomatic way to say "the dark side of Venus" in c. 3rd century BC Chinese: 太白之陰. 太白 understandably became "Great White," but it's a classical name for Venus; 陰 is the yin of yin and yang , and in one of...

I think when people are being careful, they don't allow disjunctive or negative conditions. This affects decisions about whether features are binary, for example. Like, if voicing is binary, then both [+voiced] and [-voiced] can condition phonological rules; but if it's privative, then only [voiced]...

Hong Kong had some armed robbers steal a delivery of toilet paper about a month ago.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Mar 17, 2020 5:50 pm Cambridge is making about 58 textbooks freely available online through May:

Maybe especially topical, Thomas Payne's Describing Morphosyntax is one of the now-free textbooks.

Breaking news! William Annis, of Conlangery Podcast fame, has published a pdf of the Kilta Reference Grammar. I especially like his use of auxiliaries and particles. https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ug1d8h4e5lf4kp/kilta.pdf?dl=0 It looks like a new version---but earlier ones have been available (and this...

Ah, I see that Richard W posted while I was composing---and is surely correct about "casual."

I’m not sure if it strictly counts as a ‘post-nominal modifier’, but Tournadre includes a fascinating example where the ‘case marker’ comes after a postposition: khō tsȫnkhang na̱ng-la yü̱n ri̱ngpo tä̱ʼ-pareʼ “He stayed a long time in jail” Interesting case. I guess I'd want to know if that could b...

I found the following statement in Tibetan Ergativity and the Trajectory Model : (emphasis mine) Let us recall here that written Tibetan has a paradigm of five ‘cases’: absolutive (∅), instrumental-ergative ( gis +allomorphs+free variants), ablative ( nas / las ), genitive ( gi +allomorphs+free var...

First and foremost, because spoken Arrernte actually has a normal syllable structure with onsets. All the other "arguments" in favour can be dismissed with alternative analyses, which I can't remember off the top of my head, so forgive me for that. If I find the paper that goes into detai...

Ser wrote: ↑Tue Mar 10, 2020 2:38 am Just gonna mention that in Classical Chinese...

Are you counting "而" as a marker of relationship? (All of those seem fine to me with "而," without it I'm less sure.)

Generally speaking, linguists working within generative traditions don't think Dixon's S/A/P distinction goes very deep, and tend to work instead with a distinction more like agent vs undergoer, though in different terminologies. (In relational grammar, where a lot of this comes from, I think you ta...

Egad, I hate to think what I'd have done with that in classical Chinese. (Not that I remember especially well what I did with the other prompt!)

Nerulent wrote: ↑Mon Mar 02, 2020 5:52 am What would you call it then, if not accusative?

Default or unmarked case or something like that.

I can't speak for Pabappa, but the sort of analysis I've seen is precisely that "me" isn't accusative, strictly speaking, because it's the unmarked or elsewhere case; whereas you only get "I" for the subject of a verb. Topicality doesn't really have anything to do with it, except...