Zompist Bboard Again

akam chinjir

Finally, my point (b) above is of course highly informal. Brad already quoted my standard invocation of Li & Thompson. But I think people still routinely underestimate the complexity of English syntax. I've written a 300-page book on it, and believe me, it's a primer. McCawley's textbook is 800...

akam chinjir

Like for example saying to myself "I'm gonna craft a system of aspectual contrasts and see what I can do with them" is a much more interesting proposition that simply asking "does my conlang have aspect?." For myself, I'm usually pretty unsatisfied if I set out to design a parad...

akam chinjir

(Okay, one example: apparently my English allows all three options with first person singular, at least.) Could you give an example? To my knowledge, English doesn’t have any clitic pronouns, and has only exceedingly rare pro-drop. I wrote that after noticing that in my previous sentence, I'd pro-d...

akam chinjir

No, that wasn’t what I was talking about. Basically, if you have a language with pronominal clitics (for subjects, say), you can do either ‘I see you’ or ‘1s=see you’. If you have a language with pervasive zero anaphora, you can do either ‘I see you’ or ‘∅ see you’. I was asking whether I could com...

akam chinjir

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 3:29 pm It sounds a bit Yoda-ish to me, but English isn't my first language.

Does it help if you make "his job" a contrastive topic? ("His job Mike hates, but his conlanging he loves.")

akam chinjir

Richard W wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 3:02 pm I'm now having trouble deciding whether "His job Mike hates" is a grammatical English sentence when 'his' refers to Mike.

It's fine for me, I'm pretty sure.

akam chinjir

The wikipedia article on pottery says so, but without the sort of detail you'd probably want.

akam chinjir

Another quick question: are there any languages with both pervasive zero anaphora (e.g. as covered by chris_notts here ) as well as subject pronominal clitics? I’m guessing not (if you have one highly reduced form of reference, you don’t need another), but I thought I’d better check before adding o...

akam chinjir

That sounds right to me, though some people would say "movement" instead of "fronting."

Incidentally, checking my instincts on this I came upon a relevant Language Log post that you might find interesting. (There's useful stuff in the comments, too.)

akam chinjir

I’ve been reading through two grammars recently, of Chalcatongo Mixtec and Northeast Ambae (Lolovoli dialect). One thing that has struck me particularly about these two languages is that they both have topic fronting, and in both languages the fronted topic is extra-clausal (e.g. it can co-occur wi...

akam chinjir

So at this point, I think I’m a bit stumped… Does anyone else have any ideas? Matthew Gordon has both a book and a handbook chapter (with a free online draft ) called "Syllable Weight," they're both about this stuff. One of the lessons is that stress assignment and minimal word constraint...

akam chinjir

"We who are about to die salute you."

akam chinjir

Does anyone know of any good resources on syntactic ergativity, as opposed to morphological ergativity? I want to write a section about it as the next post in my ergativity series , but none of my sources (mainly Dixon, McGregor, Oxford Handbook of Ergativity ) seem to have much information about i...

akam chinjir

bradrn actually talked about that account of split ergativity in his latest post

akam chinjir

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Fri May 08, 2020 2:21 pm I think what we learn from all this is that it's a fine, fine line between Sumer and Shang.

akam chinjir

On the other hand, none of this helps with my original question: what is the difference between the continuous and the progressive? (Although I don’t think you meant to address this question at all in your post.) As I said earlier, I don't think we've found one, unless someone can find one in a lan...

akam chinjir

(Also, completely off-topic tangential question: what is functionalism? I’ve heard you use the term a couple of times, but I have no idea what it means.) Probably you'd say "typology" in about the same contexts? I more or less mean it as a cover term for non-formal typological work; but I...

akam chinjir

Hey, I spotted the code switching!

akam chinjir

For example, the so-called "reflexive pronouns" of Classical Latin always refer back to the subject of the main verb no matter where they are in the sentence. This means that they aren't quite the stereotype of "reflexive pronouns" in modern Western European languages, but rathe...

akam chinjir

I think C J Cherryh's Foreigner books do a fair bit of that, the atevi having very different emotions from humans.

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