tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jan 23 13:56:45 1998

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Re: Locatives and {-bogh} (was Re: KLBC Poetry)

At 07:01 PM 1/22/98 -0800, ghunchu'wI' wrote:
>ja' SuStel:
>>...You can use locatives in combination with relative clauses
>>as long as the locative noun is either the subject or object of the relative
>>clause.  (Okrand said this somewhere, can someone tell me where?  It was
>>along the lines of, "I can't seem to make the locative be anything other
>>than subject or object of the clause.")
>
>No, what he said was he couldn't make the *head noun* of the relative clause
>be anything except its subject or object.  He never explicitly addressed the
>grammar behind the {-Daq} in {meQtaHbogh qachDaq Suv...}
>

Dang! Just when I thought I'd come to a sort of epiphany regarding
{-bogh} clauses!  It suddenly dawned on me why (I thought) you couldn't
solve the "ship in which I fled" problem.  My reasoning was: the head noun 
of a {-bogh} phrase can only be the subject or object of the {-bogh} verb,
since by definition that's what {-bogh} modifies. It follows from this that 
the head noun can only be the subject or object of the main verb in the
outer phrase, since a noun can't simultaneously be marked with a Type
5 suffix in the outer phrase (ignoring {-'e'} for the moment) and unmarked 
in the {-bogh} phrase.  You could parse a sentence like {muSuch HoD DaqIpbogh}
as {muSuch (HoD/HoD) DaqIpbogh}, where the two {HoD}'s are meant to show
the two different roles it plays: subject of the outer verb/object of the
{-bogh} verb.  (Note that this works only because subject and object are
both unmarked in Klingon.  If you designated object, say, with a Type 5 suffix, 
then the part of speech of the noun in the inner and outer phrases would have 
to match.)

But I'd forgotten the {meQtaHbogh...} example.  It looks to me like
this sentence is trying to use a noun in two different modes at once:
{meQtaHbogh (qach/qachDaq) Suv}, where the noun is the subject of the
inner verb but locative in relation to the outer verb.  How is this possible?

-- ter'eS

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