Full Arguments

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Revision as of 17:37, 1 October 2022 by Lynn (talk | contribs) (Auto-terminating clauses)

Full Arguments is a proposal to merge the mid-falling tone and falling creaky tone tones (say, into mid-falling tone).

The new tone would turn intransitive verbs into adverbs, and transitive verbs into prepositions:

Sủaq súq tì sóaq.
You sing beautifully in the garden.

Here, is intransitive so it does not take súq as its complement, but is transitive so it takes sóaq as its complement.

Effectively, there is now only one kind of "adverbial", which consumes as many arguments as the verb can still hold (after filling the subject with the event variable) — hence the name.

The difficulty with this proposal is that there are a few verbs which make sense both as adverbs and prepositions, for example ào and ão.

Auto-terminating clauses

A similar idea sometimes rolled into the name Full Arguments is that of auto-terminating clauses.

The idea is that you don't need to say cy when a subclause verb has all its arguments filled.

You know that the next argument must belong to the outer clause, because the inner clause can't take any more arguments.

Mẻoca lôı súq nháo jí.
The fact that you hate them saddens me.

It would be ungrammatical for to be a third argument to loı, which is "full" — so it must be a second argument to meoca.