Zompist Bboard Again

I've definitely seen English classed as marked nominative, at least in Mark Baker, Case, but I'm sure I've also seen it elsewhere.

Ah, interesting. I've actually been wondering recently how variable this is. There's a view, that's a bit appealing to me and might be right of my own English, that English is marked nominative language (in pronouns), more precisely that you only get "I" (etc) when it's the subject of a ve...

Meanwhile, English, unlike French and Spanish, even allows pronouns to coordinate on an unrepeated verb: "I thought I could save you, and you me ". Nice example! I am definitely opening a new file now for things to put in the next edition of my syntax book. Just for completion, Spanish ca...

In Spanish they have some freedom to hop up in "linked" finite+infinitive verbs. Quiero verte ~ Te quiero ver both mean 'I want to see you'; even though te modifies ver , it can jump up the syntax tree and superficially appear to modify quiero instead. Ah, you can't do that in French? (I ...

I’m still not quite sure about how this would work. Why would ‘bread’ be accusative in both cases? I was ignoring all sorts of potential complications and just thinking that it's still the object of a verb, so would still get accusative case. (I think probably the main alternative would be for it t...

Differential object marking occurs when different objects are case-marked differently depending on their properties. These could be more or less invariant lexical properties, such as animacy, or more variable pragmatic properties such as definiteness or specificity. (Spanish has DOM of the first sor...

The other alignment will usually be nominative-accusative Do you have numbers on this? I'd have thought constructions in which neither argument is marked would be relatively common, at least with TAM splits. (More on that in a bit.) Incidentally, if you're right about this, why speak of split ergat...

It sounds a bit like arguments I associate with Trudgill and McWhorter, that relatively isolated languages with relatively few speakers are more likely to preserve certain kinds of complexity; or conversely that certain kinds of simplicity arise pretty much only when a language gets large numbers of...

I've seen "ergative" used that way, Ser, for example of classical Chinese. Some people criticise it, but it seems to be reasonably well established, and it's hard to see it being confusing. (It's less confusing than "unergative" anyway; in a split-S language, it's the unergative ...

The generic is the use or non-use of articles when talking about concrete entities in general terms (what they are as a type). English typically uses unmarked (indefinite) nouns, in the plural for count nouns and the singular for mass nouns. E.g. Beetles amaze me, Languages are complex, I love lang...

What do you mean by "natural" in this context? One way of looking at it, everything actual is natural (i.e., consistent with the laws of nature).

Relating to complement clauses. What is going on between a) "X is sad that Y Z" and b) "X want that Y Z"? Is the complement clause of a being used adverbially or is it the object of a transitivized intransitive verb? You're pretty safe just saying that it's a complement clause. ...

Thanks for explaining! But I thought that nominalisations can’t always mark the full range of tense and mood distinctions: in fact, you yourself said earlier that in the system I gave, nominalisations are more likely to lack the full range of distinctions. This seems a bit contradictory to me thoug...

I didn’t realise that even consistently head-final languages like Turkish put the complementiser before the clause! Maybe I’ll do that then. But do you have any idea how this is affected by the fact that I want to mark complement clauses with a clitic rather than a separate complementiser? Compleme...

This is very interesting, but makes my situation a bit tricky. As I mentioned, my normal word order is SOV, but the complement clause is regularly extraposed to the end of the clause, giving SVO. So should my complementiser go after (from SOV) or before (from SVO) the complement? Putting it before ...

A few thoughts, not necessarily especially informed. I think when you've got an overt complementiser, it's usually on the same side of the clause as the verb is. But there've got to be exceptions, so maybe it doesn't matter. (I know I've seen this pattern given as an explanation of why Mandarin does...

Oh, one thing I forgot. If there's anything you're thinking of as a religious tradition, it's worth thinking about how important doctrinal orthodoxy is to that tradition---and especially to take seriously the idea tat it might not be especially important. (Like, as I understand it, the early history...

Agree with zompist, especially about existentialism. Very, very strange that it shows up in both of your diagrams. Empiricism and rationalism aren't much better---of some use (but it's complicated) telling the history of modern western philosophy, no use that I know of talking about any other tradit...

Anyway: I suspect that both your sentences use a headless relative clause rather than a complement clause. Mainly this is because you can transform ‘what you did last summer’ into the NP ‘the thing that you did last summer’ without affecting the meaning of either sentence; I'm pretty sure "I a...

Now I’m really confused. Before, you said that the verb can move to C unless there’s a complementiser here — but now, you seem to be saying that the verb may move to C only if there is already a complementiser here. What have I missed? Oh, just different rules in different languages. It might be as...