Talk:Secundative language

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Examples

How about some examples of secundative languages?

Added some examples from the Malchukov et al. paper. -Rmalouf (talk) 21:12, 1 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This needs considerably more example to be clear to a non-linguist like myself. I'd suggest listing a number of such languages, hopefully including some that may possibly be familiar to readers. It would help to know even if this is a rare class,or includes most languages, and whether there is any connection with language families.

Technical terms need to be defined briefly at the first use--not just relying on thr linked e WP article, but the linked article will of course show the details. Again, one English example would help--not just at the bottom, bt as early as possible. The one language everyone here will know is English. If this makes the paragraphs too complicated to follow, one way of dealing with it is footnotes.

I tried to copy over some definitions, but I had some trouble, as I had difficult understanding those articles either.-- especially Patient (grammar). I gather it's a way of making more precise what we used to call the object of a sentence. Nor do I clearly understand what is meant by a thematic relation except that it's also called a "theme", which , like "Patient," is a special use of a very common word & is therefore confusing. DGG ( talk ) 20:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"The ball was given Mary by John"

I notice that someone put a "citation needed" tag on the claim that this is well-formed in some English dialects, which I tend to view as a weak challange when a page contains many other uncited claims and not many other such tags. I don't know where to look for a citation for this except maybe looking up to see if it shows up in corpuses. I just wanted to say that I, as a native English speaker, would say "The ball was given to Mary by John," but not "The ball was given Mary by John." I don't find it surprising that the latter would exist in some dialects, since I've heard things like "he gave it me" in fiction, but perhaps someone suspects that the "to" might actually be there in the dialects that inspired this statement.DubleH (talk) 09:50, 1 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]