tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Oct 11 08:44:07 1996

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RE: partitives

HomDoqvo':

> Holtej writes:
> > 
> > 
> > ghunchu'wI'vo':
> > > Is {cha' Dujchaj} "two of their ships" or "their two ships"?  Both
> > > interpretations are sensible, so that doesn't help much. 
> > 
> > Both interpretations are sensible sentences in English, but (I'd say) 
> > only one is currently supported as an interpretation of the Klingon.
> 
> I, too, am not sure I understand the distinction between 'cardinal'
> and 'prepropositional' (?); but what if Klingons perceive {Dujchaj}
> not as "their ship" but as "ship of theirs" - would then {cha' Dujchaj},
> interpreted 'cardinally', mean "two (ships of theirs)" (which seems to
> me to be the same thing as "two of their ships")?

"Presuppositional."  :)  There's no difference in interpretation between "ship of theirs" and "their ship."  It's just two different wordings in English.  The difference between cardinal and presuppositional depends upon the interpretation of quantifiers.  

Think about it in terms of sets.  If I say, "some Klingons beamed aboard our ship, and two of them are on the bridge!"  we have two examples of quantifiers in that sentence.  We have "some Klingons" and "two of them."  The first one, "some Klingons," is cardinal.  Speakers of English don't interpret it in this context as a subset of a larger set.  It's not that there can't be a larger, encompassing set, it's just that there's no reference to it in the interpretation of this sentence.  Some Klingons.  That's it.  That phrase establishes a reference to a single set.  Now the second quantified noun phrase, "two of them," is presuppositional.  In interpreting that phrase, there is understood to be an encompassing set of Klingons, and this is a subset of that set.  The size of the subset is identified by the quantifier.  That's basically the difference between cardinal and presuppositional interpretations.  It's not syntax, it's semantics.  (It's termed "presuppositional", because the interpretation presupposes that there's a set in the context.)

English has this really nice test for cardinality.  You can use what is called "existential there-insertion."  

	some of the ships are in orbit	presuppositional
	some ships are in orbit		cardinal
	there are some ships in orbit	existential there-insertion (cardinal)

You can't be both cardinal and presuppositional at the same time:

	* there are some of the ships in orbit

With Klingon, it's hairy, because we're talking about semantics, not syntax.  Look at this previous sentence again; there's nothing syntactically wrong with it.  In just the same way, there's nothing syntacticallly wrong with /cha' Dujchaj/.  But if it turns out that this syntactic construction forces a cardinal interpretation, then this sentence will likely be ungrammatical (the more I think about this, the more I think ghunchu'wI' was right, that possessives force a presuppositional context).

	* there are their ships in orbit
	* there are two their ships in orbit
	* there are their two ships in orbit

We have rules for syntax for Klingon, and we can follow them.  But we don't have any such rules for the semantics of Klingon.  We don't really know how this will be interpreted, other than translations of canon which we're given.

> > > But try
> > > {Hoch qamDu'vam} -- "all of these feet" or "*these all feet"?  This
> > > is a bit less ambiguous, and it seems to lend support to a possible
> > > partitive use of numbers before nouns.
> > 
> > I'd say that in this case, the one supported interpretation is less 
> > sensible; just because the other one is more sensible in English, 
> > doesn't mean it's more supported in Klingon.  {{:) 
> > 
> and although you can't do with "this" and "that", what I did above
> with "their", in English, maybe you can in Klingon; they belong to
> the same class of noun suffixes after all.
> 
> or are there canon phrases that clearly show, the interpretation
> I've given above cannot be used?

It's not that there's canon to show you can't do it; there's no canon to show you can.  

> HomDoq

--Holtej

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