Timeline for What's the global difference between nouns and verbs?
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| Mar 4, 2012 at 21:20 | comment | added | James C. | I think that generally sentences consisting solely of nouns are equational, with an implicit third person argument. So xóots á-yú ‘brown.bear FOC-DIST’ ‘that’s a bear’. You can analyze the FOC particle as an adjunct of the NP, so the whole sentence is just an NP. There is an implict third person represented by ‘that’ in the English translation, but -yú is not an anaphor and there’s no <i>pro</i> licensed, so there is no syntactic third person argument. You can do this in English sort of, by saying things like ‘bear’ and pointing, but people usually analyze this as elision or the like instead. | |
| Mar 3, 2012 at 18:00 | comment | added | Qwertie | @James C, I must ask, when a noun by itself is a sentence, what does the sentence mean? Can any noun be a sentence? | |
| Nov 22, 2011 at 10:22 | comment | added | JPP | @JamesC. As a less sophisticated example, you can consider any language with zero copula (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula); they include languages as unexotic as Latin, Russian or Turkish. | |
| Nov 21, 2011 at 19:38 | comment | added | James C. | Also, the “syntactic format” you’re bringing up, which is generally referred to as “argument structure”, is a property that is also described for nouns. For example, if a language has an alienability distinction then some nouns have an obligatory argument and some do not. Some nouns even require two arguments, paralleling the intransitive/transitive contrast of verbs. If adpositions are considered to be heads of their own phrases then they too have argument structure, requiring a noun phrase. | |
| Nov 21, 2011 at 19:34 | comment | added | James C. | There are a not insignificant number of languages where nouns can form sentences on their own. The language I work on, Tlingit, has sentences consisting entirely of noun phrases despite (or perhaps because of) having an extraordinarily complex verb. Salishan and Wakashan languages can have sentences consisting entirely of nouns, where the nouns even include tense marking. So “sentence forming” is not a valid criterion for noun–verb distinction. | |
| Nov 19, 2011 at 1:35 | history | edited | Qwertie | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 19, 2011 at 0:57 | history | edited | Qwertie | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 19, 2011 at 0:51 | history | answered | Qwertie | CC BY-SA 3.0 |