[tlhIngan Hol] Transitivity of qID

[De'vID]

On Tue, 7 May 2019 at 21:00, Jeffrey Clark <jmclark85 at gmail.com> wrote:

> In boQwI’, {qID} is marked as a transitive verb. I assumed that the object
> of the qID would logically be the subject of the joke; but after a
> discussion on the KLI Discord, we could not find any sourcing for
> transitive qID, and the gloss does not directly imply an object.
>
> Can anyone confirm that qID takes an object and what the object might be?
>

At the Saarbrücken qepHom in 2011, Okrand gave some guidelines for what
verbs take what objects. He explained that if the gloss for a verb is such
that you can "[verb] that [sentence]" in English and it makes sense, then
you can (normally) write {[mu'tlhegh] 'e' [wot]}. He also said that verbs
defined as "[verb] a [noun]" can (usually) take objects, which must be
things of type "[noun]".

Unfortunately, I didn't write down most of the examples he used, because I
believed at the time that they were obvious. I did note down {ghet}, {Quj},
and {reH}, which were his running examples. {ghet} can take {'e'}, whereas
{Quj} and {reH} do not. {Quj}, however, can take "Monopoly" as its object.
There were examples involving other verbs which I didn't write down, but
which I think included {lay'}, {maq}, {'ol}, and {Sov}. But I don't recall
which were brought up by Okrand and which were proposed by other people. I
did write down that {Qoch} was a suggestion which he confirmed can take
{'e'} as its object. (Because you can say "I disagree that..." and so on.)

Since {qID} is defined as "joke, make a joke, tell a joke", based on the
above guidelines, one should be able to say things like {... 'e' luqID}
"they joked that" as well as {qID tlhaQqu' qIDpu'} "she told a very funny
joke".

However, Okrand never wrote down these guidelines and only gave them
verbally (AFAIK), so I suppose they don't have the authority of canon.
Also, even if he did write them down, I'm sure people would still argue
about whether any particular verb's definition fits the pattern. It seems
pretty clear to me that {qID} *can* take an object, but maybe it's
debatable whether it's {'e'} ("joke" is like "pretend"), {qID} ("make a
joke" is like "play a game"), or both.

-- 
De'vID
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