[Tlhingan-hol] Aspect, etc

[SuStel]

On 12/3/2015 4:55 PM, Will Martin wrote:
> So, trying to explain how I understand this, I’ve seen a verb without a
> Type 7 suffix as if it were a dot on the time line. The action of the
> verb happens. That’s the dot. Maybe it also happened at some points
> before and after the dot. We don’t care. We’re just noting that at least
> a dot of activity happens within the time setting of the statement.
> {wa’Hu’ jIyIt.} I walked yesterday. I probably didn’t walk all day long.
> I probably took more than one step at a walking pace. Somewhere between
> these extremes, walking happened, and I was the perpetrator.

You're on the right track with your grokking. A timeline is a good way 
to visualize tense and aspect, though it's hard to show in pure text. 
Some linguists use these timelines to explain tense and aspect.

A dot on a line is representative of perfective aspect. Remember, 
perfective is not just "completed," it's "completed and viewing the 
action as a whole, without visualizing how it behaves over time." A dot 
works like this. The "dot" may actually take up some space on the 
timeline, but we can't "look inside" it to see how it behaves—we can't 
see whether there was stopping or starting or if it was happening the 
whole time or anything like that. We're too zoomed out to see it as 
anything but a dot. All we know is that it happened, and it was completed.

A continuous or progressive aspect definitely has width on the timeline, 
but both ends are fuzzy. You don't know when it started, you don't know 
when it ended, but you do know that where you can see it solidly it was 
already happening when you started looking at it and it was still going 
when you stopped looking at it.

A change aspect has an immediately start at the left end and is fuzzy at 
the right end. You know it started exactly when you started looking at 
it, and it's still going on when you stop looking at it.

A resume aspect takes two forms in Klingon. The one described in TKD, 
where an action stops then starts up again, looks like the continuous 
aspect with a slice cut out of the middle. It's fuzzy on the left, gets 
cut off in the middle, comes back sharply somewhat to the right of that, 
and ends fuzzily at the right.

The other resume aspect is related; it's when something happened once 
and then happens again. This can be viewed as two dots (of any size, as 
with perfective) on the timeline separated by any distance.

Now consider an aspectless verb (meaning a Klingon verb that doesn't 
have an explicit aspect marker of some kind). It does not appear in any 
of the previous shapes. It probably does not have a starting point, a 
stopping point, or any kind of solid structure in between. In different 
situations it may look different. Maybe it's like scattered spray paint. 
Maybe it's a regular pattern of on/off/on/off. Maybe it's a vague cloud. 
Lacking aspect can mean anything that isn't covered by one of the aspects.

Here's another wrinkle. So far that timeline has no numbers on it! Tense 
is what tells us WHERE on the timeline the action is, and says nothing 
about its shape. In Klingon, the WHERE of the timeline is entirely 
described by time stamps or other time contexts.

So in {vaj Daleghpu'}, what we see is a timeline where the action is a 
dot, and it is simply common sense that tells us that the dot is found 
to the left of the current time.

> A strict interpretation of “If there’s no Type 7 suffix, then…” would
> conclude that there can’t be any other activity beyond the dot. It’s a
> dot, not a line segment, because the whole point of Type 7 is to
> describe the line segment. Actions typically do not happen without
> starts, continuations and endings.

You've got this backward, which is why you're having trouble with this 
model. Perfective aspect is a dot, or a line segment if you've zoomed 
out enough so that you can't see the innards of the segment. An action 
happens and is completed, but we don't say anything about what it was 
like WHILE it happened or how it started.

> Add {-taH}, and the action becomes a line with a vague start and a vague
> end. It goes in both directions farther than we are looking. The focus
> is on it being a line segment with no noteworthy start or stop within
> the time context of the statement. {wa’Hu’ jIyIttaH.} I walked all day
> yesterday.

Precisely correct.

> Add {-choH} and it starts at a point and continues off into the future
> farther than we are looking. We don’t care how far it goes. We’re noting
> that the dot is the starting point. It’s a line segment with a known
> beginning and an ending or absence of ending that we don’t care about
> when we make the statement. {wa’Hu’ jIyItchoH.} I started walking
> yesterday.

Exactly right.

> The perfective refers to the endpoint of the action in the same way that
> {-choH} points to the beginning of the action. {wa’Hu’ jIyItpu’}.
> Yesterday, I stopped walking.
>
> While this makes sense to me, if that’s how it works, Okrand did a piss
> poor job of explaining it in TKD. Nowhere do we get a translation that
> fits this model of what the perfective means. {vaj Daleghpu’} is not
> translated “Thus you stopped seeing it.”

It's not stopped. Klingon doesn't have a "stopped" aspect. "Stopped" 
means you're looking inside the action to see that it was moving along, 
moving along, moving along, then stopped. It would be fuzzy at the left 
and cut off at the right. Perfective means you can't see inside the 
action; you're zoomed out too far to see how it behaves inside. You know 
it happens because you can see the dot, and you know it is completed, 
but you don't know what its shape was like while it was happening.

> If {-pu’} is the flip side of {-choH},

It's not. With {-choH} you can see the beginning, middle, and ends of 
the action on the timeline whether they're solid or fuzzy. With {-pu'} 
you can only see the action as an indivisible and opaque whole, a dot.

> You think that it DOES peg the timing of the completion the same way
> that {-choH} pegs the beginning of the action, right? Am I understanding
> you correctly?

No.

> I know this sounds like I’m in your face, challenging you. That’s
> honestly not my intent. I’m not sure how to word it better.

Not at all. I'm enjoying this exchange.

-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name