On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 1:41 PM, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
The current thinking, supported by a couple of canonical sentences, seems to be that your desired sentence would be: *SoHvaD raS vIyuvmoH.*
My explanation for this is that one must do more than blindly follow syntax; one must examine the semantic role each noun is playing. There is an action, *yuv.* Someone pushes the table, *raS yuv.* I cause the table to be pushed, *raS vIyuvmoH* (doesn't say who pushes it; I cause the action so I'm the subject and it's done to the table so the table is the object). I cause you to push it, *SoHvaD raS vIyuvmoH;* you're the receiver of what I did (cause the pushing).
This is something I puzzled over for quite a while: what role is played by the object of a transitive verb plus *-moH*? In the case of *raS vIyuvmoH*, obviously the table isn't doing the pushing. But in the second example of this type of construction in TKD, *HIQoymoH *<let me hear (something)>, the object is the speaker, who would be the one doing the hearing. So in some cases in which there is only an object without a Type 5 suffix, the object can assume either role unambiguously despite the apparent lack of a fixed grammatical rule to determine it, just as in English one can say both "She teaches French" and "She teaches the children." Of course, since both types of object are frequently required, as in "She teaches the children French," I was delighted when I learned about the *-vaD*/*-moH* construction. But here's a question about *HIQoymoH*: what if you meant to say <let me be heard> instead? Depending on context, couldn't you use the same expression? Alternatively, my first instinct is just to avoid the whole *-moH* problem and say *vIQoylu' 'e' yIchaw'*. Or are there better ways to say <let me be heard>? Here's another question: can* -vaD* always work with *-moH* on a transitive verb to make an unambiguous sentence? Is the noun plus *-vaD* always going to be that which is made to do something, or could it still be the beneficiary of the action, as with *nob*?* To expand on the example from TKD, might you construe *beqvaD HIQoymoH* as <let the crew hear me> or <let me hear for the crew> or both? (My expectation is that a sentence using the *-vaD*/*-moH* construction is likely to be ambiguous out of context, but since it's a known construction, the favored interpretation is that the noun with *-vaD* performs the action of the verb, and that context would make it clear in almost any case.) ~mIp'av *Obviously there's no way to add *-moH* to the sentence *torghvaD taj nob matlh* to make Kruge cause Maltz to give Torg the knife. Or is there?