Untitled Flashcards Set

WORDS:

  • World is complicated place and live in diverse environments

  • Don’t give name to everything

    • Many ways to divide them up

  • Ex. divide up ways to talk about different body parts because all have same type of bodies and need to talk about them

  • categorized in ways that make sense without the need for a specific label - SIMPLIFY UNDERSTANDING AND CREATES CLARITY



GRAMMATICAL FEATURES:

  • Context gives needed information - CLARIFY MEANING AND ROLES OF NOUN 

  • Features associated with nouns:

    • Numbers: single, plural, dual, paucal, etc. 

    • Definiteness:  differentiates between a particular object that the speaker and hearer have in mind or just any book (possibly one hearer doesn’t know about)

      • Whether a noun refers to a specific known object or just any object of that type

    • Case: nominative or accusative

      • Nominative: “nominating” noun to identify which one (THE book is on the table) - ONE PERFORMING THE ACTION AND IS THE SUBJECT 

      • Accusative: “accusing” book of being the specific one (I read THE book) - DIRECT OBJECT OF THE ACTION

    • Gender/class: tells whether to expect singular or plural but not about the content of the noun itself (hint of what’s coming)- CHARACTERISTICS

      • Can  be indicated on noun itself and/or on other words that “agree” 

      • Ie. spanish, french, german, male, female, etc. 

  • Features associated with verbs:

    • Tense: when something happened (past, present, recent past, distant future, etc.)

    • Aspect: part of event you’re talking about

      • Perfective, inchoative

        • habitual, continuative, stative

          • Perfective: completed action

          • Inchoative: beginning of an action

          • Habitual: constantly doing

          • Continuative: moving a conversation forward

          • Stative: expressing a state or condition rather than an activity or event

    • Mood: did something actually happen? Or simply wanted it to happen? Or simply entertaining the idea?

      • Imperative or indicative

        • Conditional, subjunctive, optative

          • Conditional: express a proposition that is dependent on a condition

          • Subjunctive: expresses unreal or hypothetical situations, wishes, suggestions, etc.

          • Optative: indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action

    • Agreement: participants in the event (signal subject AND object)



HOW GRAMMATICAL FEATURES ARE REPRESENTED:

  • Affix: prefix or suffix

  • Apophony: 

  • Separate word 

  • Agglutinative: number and case on SEPARATE affixes

  • Fusional: number and case on ONE affix

  • “Zero” affixes:

  • Allomorphy: two (or more) forms of the SAME suffix 



COMPETING PRESSURES ON EXPRESSING GRAMMATICAL FEATURES:

  • Informativity:

    • Not much information - how many ppl? Which person? What role is this person going to play in this sentence?

  • Message length: if keep adding more and more onto word → word will take a long time and won’t express much 

    • sentences will be inefficient

  • Information density: lot of information packed into very little space 

    • uses as little amount of phonotactics possible to express as many features as possible, “uniform information density”

  • Phonotactics: becomes difficult to pronounce and violates the phonotactics of the language 

  • How to create affixes that respect these pressures

  • How choice of one affix can constrain possibilities for other affixes



EFFECTS OF FREQUENCY ON FORM OF AFFIXES

  • Make high-frequency words and affixes relatively short

  • Low-frequency words and affixes can be longer

  • Use “best” vowels and consonants (ones that are easiest to pronounce/perceive) for most frequent affixes

  • Sound you want to occur a lot → put in high-frequency affix

  • Agglutinative: 1 grammatical feature = 1 affix

  • Fusinal: 2 or more grammatical features = 1 affix



CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE:

  • Conceptual structure: sentence is a complete idea expressed as a string of words → look at what ideas look like in humans (how we represent something we see in our minds)

  • Have EVENTS (predicates) and PARTICIPANTS (arguments)

    • Good evidence behind this and commonly accepted belief

  • Participant is “closer” to the event than the other

    • One participant is “internal argument” (argument of a verb that has to be realized inside the maximal projection of that verb)

    • Good evidence behind this and idea is universally accepted

  • One participant is what the event is “about”

    • Participant comes first - sentence is about this participant not the other one of the event

    • Somewhat speculative and not necessarily an accepted concept

  • Expect subject verb object or subject object verb (SVO or SOV)

  • Commonality of each order:

    • SOV - 48%

    • SVO - 41%

    • Verb-initial - 10%

    • Object-initial - 1%

  • VO properties

    • Preposition object → on table

    • Noun adjective → tree green

    • Noun genitive → book boy’s

    • Noun [relative clause] → book [that I read]

  • OV properties 

    • Object preposition → table on

    • Adjective noun → green tree

    • Genitive noun → boy’s book

    • [relative clause] noun → [that I read] book

  • Tend to follow ONE pattern or the other but not always 

    • English uses preposition object, adjective noun, genitive noun, and noun [relative clause]



EVENT-PARTICIPANT RELATIONSHIP:

  • Make clear which participants belong to which events

  • Case and agreement are all about the relationship

  • Case: used to be nominative or accusative but have unmarked form → informative

  • Agreement: who/what are the participants in the event? 

    • Person, number, gender, etc. 



CREATING SENTENCES ONCE KNOW WORDS, AFFIXES, AND WORD ORDER:

  • Look at syllable structure and suffix rules

    • In Na’vi, root can end is C or V so suffix could be a single V but could NOT be a single C (would create coda consonant cluster) 

      • Could also be CV or VC or CVC - adds new syllable but is ok for phonotactics