So I went to visit him at his office, and he was happy to sit down and answer my questions. But he was taken aback by the way I asked questions. I think now is a good time to show you a bit of what we did.
Warning: NERD ALERT! If you want to get to the summary, scroll down tow where it says "IN SHORT" (yes, all caps).
Joujou timoun yan pèdi. (joujou plural? Timoun plural?)
game (of) child the lost
Joujou tiboug ké tifi ya pèdi. (joujou plural? tiboug plural? tifi plural?)
game (of) boy and girl the lost
Tifi profèsè a kouri bokou. (tifi plural? profèsè plural?)
girl (of) teacher the ran a-lot
Tifi mo frè kontan kado ya. (tifi plural? Mo frè plural?)
girl (of) my bro likes gift the
We basically spent an hour looking at sentence like the ones you see above. The sentences all have possessive subjects (The first one is "The children's game(s)"), and I was trying to figure out if any of the words in the sentence could be interpreted as singular or plural ('game' or 'games), given the following words at the end of the phrases: "ya" (plural 'the') or "a" (singular 'the'), or the absence thereof.
IN SHORT, linguists basically try to poke around the littlest parts of the grammar, prodding to find what's okay to say and what's not, what's ambiguous and what's clear. We do this by crafting sentences we know are good, sentences we know are bad, and sentences we're curious about. Then we ask speakers to listen to them and tell us what they think. The guy I was talking to was not expecting this at all.
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