[Tlhingan-hol] Type 5 on first noun

[Brent Kesler]

It's kind of a moot point since I've given up on my theory, but I think I
should clarify some of my argument.


On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:07 PM, lojmIttI'wI'nuv <lojmitti7wi7nuv at gmail.com>
wrote:

> First, I appreciate the work you put into this. It’s good to see people
> still delving into the grammar after all these years.
>
> But I can’t quite buy into your expansion of the definition of a “compound
> noun”. Okrand seems to have come up with the term to describe single words
> that contain two or more nouns, like the example in TKD of {jolpa’}. That’s
> not just the occasional pair of nouns placed next to each other. I tend to
> think of compound nouns as associated nouns, perhaps in the past placed as
> a noun-noun construction, and over time fossilized to become a single noun.
>

I was using the term "compound noun" in a more generic sense of a large
noun (or noun phrase) made of several smaller nouns--not specifically nouns
that have been fused into a single word. I apologize for the imprecision. I
sometimes jump into these debates in the heat of the moment when I don't
have my copy of TKD handy.


> As for your aversion to considering noun-noun-noun as a “chain”, I don’t
> have a problem with it. Regardless of the placement of parenthesis, there
> is a hierarchy of membership in terms of the association between the nouns
> in a noun-noun construction. There’s a difference between a captain’s sword
> and a sword’s captain. There’s a difference between a ship’s captain and a
> captain’s ship.
>

When I used the word "chain" I was specifically thinking of Markov chain
grammars, and early attempt to describe syntax as *linear* chains of words,
rather than branching tree structures. If you're assuming a hierarchy of
membership, you're using a tree rather than a chain. You don't really hear
about Markov chain grammars in linguistics anymore because they didn't
really work well. I thought the focus on only putting Type 5 suffixes on
the second noun resembled chain-like thinking rather than tree-like
thinking--that's why I used that word.

I understand that different word orders make different meanings. That's a
different question from whether the phrase is structured as a chain or a
tree.


bI'reng
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