Language with nominal TAM and no verbs: Ergative or tripartite?

Question

I'm working on a language with nominal tense–aspect–mood (TAM), i.e. inflecting nouns instead of verbs. So, a sentence like "the woman sees the man", could be roughly translated to something like "the womans see the man".

This type of sentence shows an ergative-absolutive morphosyntactic alignment: the subject of a transitive sentence is marked (ergative case), while the direct object is unmarked (absolutive case).

I also like the idea of removing verbs as a class (since tense, aspect and mood can be expressed by the subject) and "reclassify" those words as nouns. So "the womans see the man" could actually mean something like "the woman makes sight of the man", in the sense of "making eye contact". In other words, having ungrammaticalized verbs.

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

So my question is: does the language need a marking for the direct object (accusative case), having then a tripartite alignment? Or can I simply get away with only TAM marking (absolutive case) and no markings for verbs or direct objects?

I have the feeling that I'm forgetting something. I think that the idea of "not having verbs" makes sense to me, since many languages like English, French or Spanish actually lack of inflections and employ only word order, but I might be wrong.

What do you think? Thanks!

Answer 1

In your example:

Then, the actual translation for "the woman sees the man" would be "the womans sight the man". And that's the problem: "sight" and "man" are both unmarked nouns, leading to misinterpretation.

...sight is a verb.

In order to have a verbless phrase, you'd want something like "the man within the woman's sight", making it clear you're using the noun "sight" and not the verb "sight".

However, and I've seen this pointed out, if you end up needing particular constructions in order to indicate actions, all you're doing is making an overly complicated verb.

Answer 2

Maybe you're using nouns as instrumentals... so can you have noun cases, i.e. an instrumental case to distinguish whether a noun is the Object versus the Instrument?

And, I'm not sure that that necessarily makes the Instrumental Noun just a complicated verb.

Woman-SUBJ+TAM Man-OBJ Eye-INST

"Woman's (focus?) [is] on the Man via (her) Eye".

With a fixed word order, no case markings are needed.

Or TAM could potentially mark the subject. Instrumentals could be chained after the object, making them feel just a bit like adjectives or adverbs or something.