[tlhIngan Hol] Order of adverbials and type-5'ed nouns

SuStel sustel at trimboli.name
Tue Jul 9 10:38:56 PDT 2019


On 7/9/2019 1:31 PM, nIqolay Q wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2019 at 11:58 AM SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name 
> <mailto:sustel at trimboli.name>> wrote:
>
>     Let's see...
>
>         *DaHjaj SuvwI''e' jIH*/Today I am a warrior. /(TKW, KGT)
>
>     This one has a type 5'd noun after a time element. One could
>     conceivably argue that *DaHjaj SuvwI''e'* is meant to be a
>     noun-noun construction, /today's warrior,/ but I doubt this. Of
>     course, there's no OVS in this sentence.
>
> *-'e'* is sort of an unusual type 5 prefix, since not all words with 
> it necessarily go before the OVS part. It can be applied to subjects 
> and objects which would have their usual place in the sentence. In 
> this case, I think *SuvwI''e'* is more like an object than a distinct 
> syntactic phrase. (I know, *jIH* isn't really a verb so *SuvwI''e'* 
> isn't really an object, but in terms of where the nouns go, the 
> pronoun-as-copula arrangement is very similar to a standard OVS 
> arrangement.) So this would be more of a "time stamps precede the 
> object" arrangement, which we already knew.

Agreed. This sentence was just the first one I found on my first search, 
which was for the word *DaHjaj.* It's not a strong piece of evidence.

The sentence itself is notable for other reasons. It's got *-'e'* on a 
noun /before/ the pronoun. I think the purpose of the suffix is 
emphasis: /Today I am a WARRIOR (as opposed to whatever I was before)./ 
I think this is the only time a pronoun-as-to-be sentence has an *-'e'* 
suffix on the noun before the pronoun.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

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