[Tlhingan-hol] Multiple Adverbials (was Re: Piraha)

[David Holt]

I'm not sure exactly which situation you are talking about, but remember that the plural suffices are completely optional. There are times when they help with clarity, but {vagh rep} is clearly plural and so the {-mey} is not required. It is very handy particularly for rhythmic poetry and songs where some flexibility in number of syllable and rhyming is very helpful.

janSIy

--- Original Message ---

From: "qunnoQ HoD" <mihkoun at gmail.com>
Sent: November 3, 2015 7:12 AM
To: "tlhIngan Hol mailing list" <tlhingan-hol at kli.org>
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Multiple Adverbials (was Re: Piraha)



this may be like an tiny/insignificant volkswagen beetle,trying to take part at a ferrari/lamborghini exhibition, but still I would like to ask why we said
{vagh rep ret} instead of {vagh repmey ret}..

On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 12:33 AM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name<mailto:sustel at trimboli.name>> wrote:
On 11/2/2015 3:29 PM, Lieven wrote:
As far as I know, and you certainly agree, there are different kinds of
adverbials: Some of them tell WHEN something happens, some tell HOW
something happens.

I believe that Okrand did not think of classifying them like that - to
keep TKD short - so it's still possible that these must have some kind
of order (this need to be verified and proven).

My theory is that adverbs of the same type cannot occur on the same time:
{DaH tugh maSop} makes no sense
{DaH nom maSop} does make sense

What you're describing is a semantic difference, and there may or may not be merit to it. TKD, however, describes only the syntactic function of certain types of {chuvmey}.

The question boils down to: can you put multiple words in front of the OVS sentence that are not nouns or verbs? Answer: yes, if we believe the {paq'batlh} is not taking artistic license.

Are we restricted as to what those words mean? That's a question of semantics. There are certainly combinations that don't make sense, but you can't outright declare them ungrammatical. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, and all that.

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


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