[Tlhingan-hol] Type 7

[De'vID]

[warning: longish grammatical discussion about aspect ahead]

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> Okay, I've been through the entire TKD looking for evidence one way or
the other on the two proposals by SuStel that I've been having difficulties
with:
>
> 1. When a Type 7 suffix can apply to a verb, it MUST apply to the verb.
If an action is continuous, or complete, you can't use the verb without
using a Type 7 suffix. Omitting a Type 7 suffix indicates a lack of
continuity or completion. This omission of a Type 7 suffix requires us to
interpret the action as a general trend or a habit or some other
discontinuous, incomplete action.

This passage from TKD p.40 has been quoted several times already:
"The absence of a Type 7 suffix usually means that the action is not
completed and is not continuous (that is, it is not one of the things
indicated by the Type 7 suffixes)."

The passage tells us that if a verb lacks a Type 7 suffix, it "usually"
means that we should interpret it as one that isn't completed and isn't
continuous.  Do you disagree that this is a reasonable understanding of
that sentence?

Maybe the disagreement is over what "usually" means.  I think a quite
reasonable position is that it means "except when context, or other
grammatical elements such as adverbials or other suffixes, override this".
And this implies that the suffixes are not optional, as their absence
signifies a particular meaning.

Reading over all the posts about aspect, there are a number of things where
I'm not completely certain I agree with SuStel, although I think his
interpretation is plausible (i.e., I think TKD and canon leave room for him
to be either right or wrong).  However, in the interpretation of the above
sentence from TKD p. 40, I'm in complete agreement with him.  I just don't
see how the sentence leaves any room for the interpretation that the
suffixes are "optional" or that the absence of a Type 7 suffix "signifies
nothing".

Maybe the disagreement is over what "optional" means.  Everyone agrees that
there are Klingon suffixes which are optional, such as the plural suffixes
on nouns when the verb prefix already indicates a noun is plural.  You and
others seem to believe that Type 7 verb suffixes are the same way.  SuStel
doesn't, and neither do I.  I agree that such suffixes can (sometimes) be
dropped even when describing an action which can be described using such a
suffix, *however* (and unlike with the plural suffixes), dropping the
suffix *changes the meaning* of what you're saying.  It's more like the
{lu-} prefix on verbs: it's required when the subject is plural, and if
it's dropped, the meaning changes, but it gets dropped anyway without an
intended change in meaning because people forget.

lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:
> 2. Verbs with {-pu'} or {-ta'} refer only to actions that begin, proceed
and end, all during the time period indicated by the time stamp. The
perfective does not focus on the end point of the action. It implies the
entire duration of the action.

This is a claim that I am less certain of, and I think the issue here is
how much information from outside of the TKD one brings with him/her when
reading it.

SuStel has been accused of bringing in information from other sources (like
Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought") into the TKD which isn't actually there.
But let's face it, we *all* do this.  If we didn't know what "nouns",
"verbs", or "suffixes" are, or if we didn't know what "tense" means, etc.,
we wouldn't understand the TKD at all.  There is no disagreement about what
"verb" or "noun" means, i.e., we all agree that when MO uses "verb" or
"noun", he means exactly what everyone else uses those words to mean.

The issue here is then whether when MO says that {-pu'} indicates
perfective aspect, he actually meant "perfective aspect" as it is typically
understood by linguists.  The description he gives in TKD is one sentence
long and only says that it "indicates that an action is completed" (p.41).
This is certainly *consistent* with the definition of "perfective aspect",
but it leaves open whether he intended the Klingon {-pu'} suffix to have a
characteristic (and perhaps the salient one) which "perspective aspect"
typically has, which is to cause the entire action to be treated as a whole
with no internal structure.

I happen to speak a language, Cantonese Chinese, which indicates aspect.
Indeed, the aspect system in Cantonese is quite a bit more involved than
the one in Klingon.  There are at least four aspect markers which indicate
that an action is completed: the perfective (the action is completed, and
is treated as a whole), the completive (the action is completed, focusing
on the completion), the exhaustive (the action is completed to the point
that nothing more can be done), and the experiential (the action has been
completed for the first time, is treated as a whole, and may no longer
apply).  The descriptions in brackets are what I came up with trying to
summarise them.

I tried coming up with a bunch of Klingon sentences with and without the
various aspect markers, then translating them into Cantonese and back, just
to see how the aspect markers work.  I should emphasise that I am not
claiming any relation between the aspect markers in Klingon and in
Cantonese, it's just an interesting exercise to bypass English, which
doesn't have aspect markers, for thinking about aspect in Klingon.

I found that I would use a different aspect marker in Cantonese for the
same aspect marker in Klingon, depending on context and meaning, since
aspect in Cantonese has finer gradations.

For example, if someone gave me a {chab}, and asked me if I've eaten it
yet, I can answer:

"Two days ago, I eat (perfective) it." = I ate it two days ago, and
furthermore, the entire action of my eating it took place two days ago

"Two days ago, I eat (completive) it." = I finished eating it two days ago,
and I might've eaten parts of it earlier (also, I might've thrown parts of
it away)

"Two days ago, I eat (exhaustive) it." = I finished eating it two days ago,
I might've eaten parts of it earlier, and I ate all of it (I didn't throw
any of it away)

You can't answer with the experiential, which would mean "Two days ago, I
ate {chab} for the first time".  I mean, you can say this sentence, but it
isn't a valid answer to the question of whether you ate the {chab}.

You also can't answer with the unmarked "Two days ago, I eat it".
Cantonese doesn't have tense, and if you said that without one of the
aspect markers, it sounds like, "Two days ago, I (will) eat it", which
makes no sense (unless you're a time traveller).  Again, this isn't to say
that {wa'Hu' vISop} is wrong in Klingon, but the analogous sentence is
wrong in Cantonese.  In Cantonese, it would have to be the equivalent of
{wa'Hu' vISoppu'} or {wa'Hu' vISopta'}.  There is at least a hint that
Klingon may work the same way: on TKD p.40, it says that verbs without a
Type 7 marker may be translated as the English future tense, but it says
nothing about being abe to translate them into the past tense.

After going through the above exercise to clarify for myself what exactly
the disagreement is, I think it's over whether {-pu'} acts like the
perfective, or whether it's like the completive (or perhaps has shades of
both?).  On SuStel's side, MO actually used the word "perfective" to label
{-pu'}, rather than, say, "completive" or another word entirely.  He
doesn't use technical vocabulary for {-ta'} "accomplished, done" and {-lI'}
"in progress", describing them instead, and so the option was clearly open
to him to label {-pu'} as, say, "completed".  But "perfective" and
"continuous" are actual technical terms for two aspects, and it's not
unreasonable to think that he labeled them that way because that's actually
what they indicate.  If someone claims that when MO used a word in TKD in a
way other than how they're commonly understood, I think the onus is on them
to explain why they think this.  OTOH, MO has made mistakes and has
occasionally been sloppy, so it's not impossible either.

-- 
De'vID
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