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A comment on Reasons some languages are harder to learn. Parent comment

Re:Reasons some languages are harder to learn by bradrn on Monday May 17, 2021 @10:11AM (#27183613)
> Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof.

Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology.

> Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.

Ooh, I wrote a whole series of essays on that! [0] Morphosyntactic alignment is a favourite topic of mine. (I perhaps didn’t spend as much time on split intransitivity as I should have… I really should write an addendum or something which properly covers split intransitivity. Know any good resources, by any chance?)

[0] https://www.verduria.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=545

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Re:Reasons some languages are harder to learn by Tainnor on Monday May 17, 2021 @06:23PM (#27189140)
I wrote my master's thesis about split intransitivity.[1] You can find some resources in the bibliography, although I'm sure there's tons more.

I'll have to check your essays too!

edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis.

[1] https://github.com/Fryie/thesis

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Re:Reasons some languages are harder to learn by bradrn on Monday May 17, 2021 @10:39PM (#27190724)
Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right.

(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )

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Re:Reasons some languages are harder to learn by Tainnor on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:38AM (#27191566)
Well, if you check my thesis (and can make sense of the convoluted sentences), a big part of it was wading through the mess of terminology and also quite imprecise definitions. I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour, at least if we want to use them meaningfully for cross-linguistic comparison. That's why I attempted a definition more centred on Lazard and Haspelmath.

It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.

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Re:Reasons some languages are harder to learn by bradrn on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @04:08AM (#27192273)
> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour

Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.

[0] http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~ardeal/papers/Deal-ergativi...

> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.

Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)

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