On Thu, 2017-08-10 at 19:20 -0400, SuStel wrote:

On 8/10/2017 7:13 PM, DloraH wrote:

On Thu, 2017-08-10 at 12:25 -0400, SuStel wrote:

On 8/10/2017 11:52 AM, mayqel qunenoS wrote:

...

*
*

What I'm trying to understand (and the more this thread continues, the
"trying" becomes "struggling"), is why -as De'vID wrote- "the pattern
is {X-vo' Y-Daq chegh} and not {Y-Daq X-vo' chegh}".

I don't know anything about there being a REASON it can only work that
way. What I know is what Voragh has already pointed out: we have many
canonical examples of*X-vo' Y-Daq OVS*  and none of *Y-Daq X-vo' OVS.*
The answer to your question is "that's just the way it is."

For me, a leading -Daq would be the location where the whole [-vo' -Daq
chegh] is taking place.

HoD - [nuqDaq beq?  yuQ ghoSta''a'?]
yaS - [jISovchu'be'.  yuQ ghoSlaw']
yuQ ghoS HoD.  beq nej.

Meanwhile... DujDaq puchpa'vo' vutpa'Daq chegh beq.

I don't think you'd even need to appeal to three syntactic nouns to do 
that: *DujDaq puchpa'vo' chegh*/on the ship, he returns from the 
bathroom./ There's probably some scoping rules baked into our 
language-using brains that does this. No way to tell if Klingons do the 
same.

But you left out the part about returning "to the galley".  

I put the DujDaq on there to emphasis that the crewman is still on the
ship; as opposed to returning from a toilet to a galley, in some
building down on the planet.

I left it out for exactly the reason I stated: you don't need it to see what the role of X-Daq Y-vo' V seems to be when X is of a greater scope than Y. I wasn't continuing to describe your scenario.

You're talking about the crew of a ship. First you talk about the landing party. Then you say DujDaq puchpa'vo' chegh HoD on the ship, the captain returns from the bathroom. This is unlikely to be interpreted as the captain returns to the ship from the bathroom. Thanks to the apparent scoping of syntactic nouns, you need to see X-vo' Y-Daq to interpret them in the same scope, from X to Y. In the other order, Y-Daq X-vo', it FEELS like Y has a different precedence than X. On/at/in Y, something happens from X.

Again, we have no evidence of this; it's just some implicit scoping that we have trouble ignoring. It's probably evidence of English bias.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name