[Lingtyp] A list of 50 basic sentences

[Hartmut Haberland]

Dear Ian,
I have a few comments.
I was wondering about
Genitive

Alienable

Genitive

Inalienable

Is it a good idea to use ‘genitive’? Would ‘possessive’ not be better?
Also I wonder about languages like Finnish which express contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness by word order:
Auto on kadulla. ‘The car is in the street.’
Kadulla on auto. ‘There is a car in the street.’ (-ulla is inessive case.)
Also think of Italian
La macchina è rotta.
È rotta la machina.
both ‘The car is broken’, but are answers to different questions (Where is your car?, Why are you late?, resp.); same (SV vs. VS) in Greek. How would you get these results?
Best, Hartmut

Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> På vegne af JOO, Ian [Student]
Sendt: 8. maj 2021 15:08
Til: LINGTYP <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Emne: [Lingtyp] A list of 50 basic sentences

Dear all,

I am trying to make a list of 50 basic sentential meanings.
The goal is to make parallel corpora of different languages based on this list of sentences.
Each sentence on the list serves to check whether a language has a given grammatical feature, and if so, in what form the language expresses it.
When creating each sentence, I tried to limit its vocabulary to basic words that are found in most languages, avoiding culture-specific words.
I would appreciate it if you could have a look at the attached file and advise what I should add/remove/modify.

From Hong Kong,
Ian
[https://www.polyu.edu.hk/emaildisclaimer/PolyU_Email_Signature.jpg]

Disclaimer:

This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and notify the sender and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University) immediately. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful.

The University specifically denies any responsibility for the accuracy or quality of information obtained through University E-mail Facilities. Any views and opinions expressed are only those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the University and the University accepts no liability whatsoever for any losses or damages incurred or caused to any party as a result of the use of such information.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20210508/2f23c40b/attachment.htm>