Case tags

Hi Rick,

 

Pardon this radical suggestion, but it seems to me that the case tags are an underutilised feature in Ladekwa (soon to be Latejami?). For example, why classify verbs according to their case structures if you still need to use other case tags elsewhere? Why not use case tags for agent, patient and focus as well, so that you can use whatever cases you want for the nouns, in whatever order you want, and then merely distinguish between the static and dynamic verbs? Not only would this greatly simplify the verb classification system, but it also would obviate the need for most of the voice system as well, because of the greater flexibility of the word order. Indeed, the only non-redundant distinction that the voice system would have left to make is between suppressing a case ( e.g. middle voice) and merely hiding it (e.g. passive voice), and even then, I'm not really sure that that distinction is meaningful.

 

If you're gonna overhaul Ladekwa anyway, I thought I'd better throw that in there, especially since it frees up a few more classifiers...

 

Geoff