Consider a language that marks names of tribes as to whether they are considered enemies or not at the time being. The markers are derivative, and the derived nouns reside in different parts of the noun hierarchy (or can have different cases on them, i.e. the 'enemy' version might have some case restrictions).
Consider, for instance, a restriction whereby an enemy cannot be the recipient or beneficiary of an act carried out by a non-enemy. Or maybe more generally that enemies cannot be subject of verbs with beneficiaries at all, or maybe enemies cannot be beneficiaries. Any one of those might be of some interest.
These, however, lead to the need for voice constructions that permit those meanings to be expressed.
Another thing that is needed is ways of expressing that some group now have become or ceased to be enemies, and this could conceivably be done in some interesting ways - consider, for instance, deriving these verbs from the tribe names! Thus the template "tribename+transition suffix+verbalizer suffix" would give a personless verb expressing such a transition.
No comments:
Post a Comment