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On 10/18/05, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote: > On Oct 18, 2005, at 8:06 AM, Jim Henry wrote: > It should have the same position relative > to its headword as other modifier particles. > Don't most such particles precede > their head in ceqli? > Hm. I think you're right. But before we get too deep into this, how about saying. > "The topic of a sentence is normally the same as the subject, which comes first. If another word is the topic, it should come first: Let's see. Assuming the listener can tell at once whether a word is a noun (or pronoun) or verb -- or which way it is being used in a given context -- then a sentence will parse to one of these patterns: NVN VNN NNV which the listener needs to be able to match up unambiguously with the permissible V/S/O word orders. He can do that if you allow only SVO VSO OSV And then your three permitted word orders would correspond to topicalizing any one of the three main sentence constituents. That probably works just as well. The only way it would be ambiguous is if in some cases it's uncertain if a given word is being used in its noun or its verb sense. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm ...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field