Wednesday, June 13, 2012

3+ Roles

I was considering how "Trinitarian" might play out grammatically and I had some constraints.  I wanted there to be three parts to every sentence: subject, object and verb.  I wanted the grammatical voice of every verb to be either active, middle or passive.  I quickly saw that this would not cover everything, so I decided to write myself a loop-hole: a topic marker.

I had decided words could be either nouns or verbs, depending on their position in the sentence.  (I had picked SOV at the time.)  But as I really considered valency for the first time, I saw that I had a real problem.  Voice could be either active, middle or passive, but what if it was unmarked?  One would still have two nouns marked as SUBJECT and OBJECT and VERB.  I stumbled upon the pseudo-passive.  Here are two example of it:

  1. The Ancient Egyptians had their cats killed.
  2. Vain bald men get their heads waxed.
The subjects stay subjects (Egyptians and men) and the objects stay objects (cats and heads) but the subject need not be the one acting on the subject at all.  I decided that would be my option for "no voice specified but and object and subject still given."
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But what about three argument sentences, either with indirect objects or genitive phrases?  Ex.:
  1. I gave the cat the turtle.
  2. You ate food in France.
Given that it is my second-best language, it's no wonder that my thought turned to Korean first.  In Korean, one could use the equivalents of the English "to the cat" /고양이한테 and "in France"/프랑스에서.  But there is another option: the topical.

  1. 고양이는 내가 거북이를 주었다.  In regards to the cat, I gave the turtle.
  2. 프랑스는 내가 음식을 먹었다. In regards to France, I ate food.
These examples are a little strange, but you get the idea.  Actually, you might not get the idea, since English isn't a topic-comment language.  Listen to Conlangery episode 53 for help.  Anyway, it's a solution to eliminate a lot of genitives, datives and double accusatives.

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