On Apr 16, 2019, at 2:31 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
In a sentence without -moH, the situation is very simple. The subject is always the agent/theme/experiencer. Easy.
“Easy”? You’re introducing terms that you seem to think are widely understood, but your use of them doesn’t give much information about what you mean.
Tell me you're interested in learning about how semantics works. You give me a genuine, honest effort to understand it and I'll spend my time telling you about it. But your past behavior on this topic suggests to me that you're uninterested in talking about it. You've got what you've already decided, and you don't care to know anything else.
From your earlier attempts to explain your understanding of Klingon grammar, I was under the impression that agents and experiencers were different things, and I thought themes were something else as well. Searching the web, I find lists of noun roles that include those terms, and nowhere do I see them equated.
I didn't equate them. Those are alternative roles that the subject regularly plays in Klingon.
HoD vIqIp I hit the captain. I am the agent. I
deliberately take an action.
chal vIlegh I see the sky. I am the experiencer. I receive sensory or emotional input.
I am the subject of both sentences, but my semantic role is different.
(And I erroneously said theme when I meant to say force.
But I wasn't listing exclusive possibilities, just possible
alternatives.)
Like I said, if you genuinely want an honest discussion of this,
I'm happy to oblige, but I don't think you are. I think you just
want to accuse me of something.
I still don’t understand the problem you have with calling the thing that causes the action the “subject of causation”. You tried to correct it by saying that “the subject causes”. What’s the line you are drawing between them?
"The subject causes" is not a correction of the phrase "subject
of causation." My problem with the phrase that "subject" is a
purely syntactic term. In Klingon, the "subject" is simply that
argument of a verb that comes after the verb, with which the verb
prefix must agree. A Klingon subject is not always the entity that
performs the action described by the verb; sometimes it causes
that action instead. The problem is the splitting of the sentence
into "subject of causation" and "subject of action." There is only
ONE subject, and the verb prefix ALWAYS agrees with it, no matter
what role that subject is playing. And if you go looking for
multiple subjects tucked away inside words that aren't the
subject, you get the grammar wrong. Because if you've got a
"subject of causation" and a "subject of action," you're going to
try to PUT those subjects somewhere, and you're going to try to
make the verb prefix account for them. But they shift. Apparently
for no reason. Actually, there ARE reasons, but you can't see if
them if you're stuck on "subject."
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name