tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Feb 12 15:21:18 2010

Back to archive top level

To this year's listing

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]

Re: suffixes -lu'wI'

Andrà MÃller ([email protected]) 

2010/2/12 Brent Kesler <[email protected]>
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 8:43 AM, André Müller <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Through the translations provided by Okrand. See the example on page 39
> of
> > TKD: {Daqawlu'}, which is translated as "you are remembered" â?? I'm not
> > trying to cram passive into the {-lu'} morpheme and I explicitely said
> that.
> > But the meaning overlaps with the passive in many languages, although
> it's
> > not the same, so it's a logical assumption to go from {Daqawlu'} to "you
> are
> > being remembered [by someone]", as this matches exactly the roles that
> the
> > prefix shows. Then the only weird thing is the word order.
>
> At this point I'm surprised no one has noted this example from the
> phrases section at the back of TKD:
>
> {HuSDaq ba'lu''a'?} "Is someone sitting in this chair?"
> (This is from the top of my head -- I don't remember the actual gloss.)
>
>
The original example is:

{quSDaq ba'lu''a'?}
"Is this seat taken?"



> This is one canon example where a {-lu'} verb does not overlap with
> the passive. You can't say *"In this chair is sat?" You can say "Is
> this chair being sat in?" but I think the preposition modifies "sat"
> rather than governs "chair". In that case, the structure of the
> English passive doesn't quite map to the structure of the Klingon
> "passive". But {ba'} is intransitive; it can't take an object, so
> calling {ba'lu'} a passive is meaningless.
>
>
The English gloss "Is this seat taken?" actually does use a passive
construction. You could of course also use a (perhaps more literal) active
translation: "Does someone sit on the chair?". The structure of the English
translations doesn't really matter for the Klingon meaning. {ba'} is
intransitive indeed, but some (natural) languages can form passives of
intransitive verbs, cf. German "Es wird getanzt." (lit. It is being
danced.), meaning something like "There's dancing going on."
If one wants to interpret {-lu'} as some kind of passive marker, it would
work on intransitive verbs as well. So {ba'lu'} as a passive is not
meaningless, it would simply mean "it is being sat" (might be ungrammatical
in English, but not in German: "Es wird gesessen.").



> Add this to David's example, {yaS qIplu'}, and it appears that {-lu'}
> is not valency changing the way a passive should be, despite the
> strange use of the pronomial prefixes. But an example André gives
> indicates that even with the prefixes, there is no valency change:
>
> You're absolutely right with the valency. That's why I'm also reluctant in
calling it a passive. It shares some trades with the passive, but doesn't
probably fall into the common definition of a passive (as if there was a
single one, hah).




> {naDev puqpu' lutu'lu'} "One finds children around here."
> {naDev puqpu' lutu' yaSpu'} "The officers finds children here." (added
> for comparison)
>
>
Your second sentence is ungrammatical, because {lu-} as a prefix means
3PL>3SG. So it should be:

{naDev puq lutu' yaSpu'} "The officers find the child here."
or
{naDev puqpu' tu' yaSpu'} "The officers find the children here."


> André's explanation for the lack of valency change in the apparent passive:
> > The prefix indicates that a first person plural subject is involved. But
> > when using an overt subject in such a sentence, it's used in object
> > position
>
> In other words, the Klingon "passive" moves the object argument to the
> subject position, but if the object is actually expressed rather than
> merely implied, it moves it back to the object position? Would that be
> a valency cloaking construction?
>
> Sounds right to me (at least according to my interpretation). But does it
cloak valency? In both my and Okrand's analysis either the prefixes or the
word order behaves in a weird way. Prefixes and word order don't agree in
showing what's the subject and the object. That's the weird thing about this
whole {-lu'} issue. And neither I or Marc Okrand gave an explanation of why
this really happens. I didn't, because I have no idea (yet). Okrand didn't,
because his book is for non-linguists and most people wouldn't care.

- André

Back to archive top level