[Tlhingan-hol] Time and Type 7 verb suffixes

[David Trimboli]

On 6/15/2012 9:33 AM, De'vID wrote:
> SuStel:
>> I've found a couple of phrases in KGT that unquestionably use -pu'
>> as perfect tense instead of perfective aspect. One of them is {nIn
>> Hoch natlhlu'pu'} "all the fuel has been consumed."
>
> As I wrote earlier, mentally mapping from Klingon to Cantonese, I
> came up with a list of four Cantonese aspect markers that the
> Klingon {-pu'} can map to, depending on context.  ({-ta'} also maps
> to them, but the additional telic or volitional meaning is indicated
> by other means.)  These are: perfective (咗), completive (完),
> exhaustive (哂), and experiential (過).[1]
>
> Each one, like {-pu'}, "indicates that an action is completed", but
> there are differences in meaning between them.  Perhaps the Klingon
> {-pu'} can, depending on context, cover each of these meanings.

[...]

> After re-reading TKD, going through a lot of examples, and thinking
> hard about aspect in Klingon, I think the absence of a Type 7 suffix
> does change the meaning of a sentence (and isn't optional).  I'm
> less convinced that {-pu'} behaves exactly like what a linguistic
> textbook would call a perfective aspect marker (in the abstract) at
> all times (then again, real life languages rarely behave like
> textbooks say they do).  But I think there's a case that it usually
> does (and which is why MO called {-pu'} a perfective aspect marker
> and not something else), and when it doesn't, there's a reason why
> that is so.
>
> I can come up with examples (like the two discussed in this post)
> where {-pu'} behaves like another aspect marker instead, and in
> particular: completive, exhaustive, or experiential.  However, all
> of these aspects have in common that they indicate a completed
> action. So the best explanation I can come up with, based on TKD and
> canon, is that {-pu'} does usually indicate perfective aspect, except
> when something else in the sentence (like a verb that carries an
> aspectual meaning), or context, overrides that meaning.

This is very interesting. I think you may be right: that {-pu'}
indicates one of several possible "completed" aspects, and that
perfective just happens to be the dominant or most common meaning. This
certainly covers every example I can think of.

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/