tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Apr 30 09:02:20 1994
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Re: Klingon Phrase Structure Grammar
- From: [email protected] (Nick NICHOLAS)
- Subject: Re: Klingon Phrase Structure Grammar
- Date: Sun, 1 May 94 10:59:45 EST
- In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>; from "d'Armond Speers" at Apr 30, 94 10:25 am
Hu'tegh! nuq ja' d'Armond Speers jay'?
=Granted, my experience with PSGs is limited to cursory review on the
=way to GB theory, but I've never seen reference to lexical items
=inside the PS rules.
Yeah, I was being sloppy. Substitute S\meh -> ... meh ... with S\meh ->
-> ... MEH ... ; MEH -> meh, etc.
=I'll admit to XPs like "pron" and "adv" but can
=you really make claims about "PP," "adj," and "postp"?
Klingon does have a postpositional phrase class which is distinct to normal
NPs in distribution. The Adj class differs from VP or V in that it can take
the suffix qu' and no other, and also includes ordinals. Calling -Daq
a postposition rather than an inflection is possibly a bit crude; I'll have
to revise my GB to see what they do with inflected nouns again.
=> N' P N' P___
=> / | | \
=> naDev 0 juHlIj Daq
=Null pronouns, huh. That's an aspect of Klingon grammar I'd missed
=completely!
Um, that's P for Postposition (as in head of a PP)
It was interesting to see that X-bar theory fit Klingon rather nicely. If
we ever pin down Okrand and ask him, we'll have to see whether he made
himself a PSG.
--
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* Nick Nicholas, Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Australia *
[email protected]; [email protected]
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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