Monday, December 29, 2014

Detail #132: Fun with indefinite pronouns

Consider things like 'I don't know anything', 'I didn't see anything', 'If you hear anything, call me'.

Now, obviously, anyone who has read this blog for long enough is aware that this can be remapped somewhat (but due to the recent arrival of new readers, I'll relink it), and that there are known universals about how they tend to work.

However, how about having multiple systems, and which one is used depends on some lexical detail. Maybe some verbs even vary in meaning depending on which system is used with it. (Otherwise, the distinction may be marked by some other thing, or the distinction be conflated altogether.)

The simplest way of doing this would possibly be to simply switch the morphemes used without changing the actual distinctions: 'hear' gets whatbody, whatone, 'Did you hear whatthing?', buy gets 'any'/'some' - 'did you buy anything for your sister?', 'know' gets a-body, an-one - 'I know abody who can solve your problem'. (Note: the indefinite pronoun forms given here are not all that good; I'd probably go for ones that share morphemes with other pronouns - interrogatives, relative pronouns, negative pronouns, possibly also quantifiers. English is a bit boring with regarding to what it has to offer for such things).

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