tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 15 02:30:37 2012
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Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Type 7
<p>[warning: longish grammatical discussion about aspect ahead]</p>
<p>lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:<br>
> Okay, I've been through the entire TKD looking for evidence one way or the other on the two proposals by SuStel that I've been having difficulties with:<br>
><br>
> 1. When a Type 7 suffix can apply to a verb, it MUST apply to the verb. If an action is continuous, or complete, you can't use the verb without using a Type 7 suffix. Omitting a Type 7 suffix indicates a lack of continuity or completion. This omission of a Type 7 suffix requires us to interpret the action as a general trend or a habit or some other discontinuous, incomplete action.</p>
<p>This passage from TKD p.40 has been quoted several times already:<br>
"The absence of a Type 7 suffix usually means that the action is not completed and is not continuous (that is, it is not one of the things indicated by the Type 7 suffixes)."</p>
<p>The passage tells us that if a verb lacks a Type 7 suffix, it "usually" means that we should interpret it as one that isn't completed and isn't continuous. Do you disagree that this is a reasonable understanding of that sentence?</p>
<p>Maybe the disagreement is over what "usually" means. I think a quite reasonable position is that it means "except when context, or other grammatical elements such as adverbials or other suffixes, override this". And this implies that the suffixes are not optional, as their absence signifies a particular meaning.</p>
<p>Reading over all the posts about aspect, there are a number of things where I'm not completely certain I agree with SuStel, although I think his interpretation is plausible (i.e., I think TKD and canon leave room for him to be either right or wrong). However, in the interpretation of the above sentence from TKD p. 40, I'm in complete agreement with him. I just don't see how the sentence leaves any room for the interpretation that the suffixes are "optional" or that the absence of a Type 7 suffix "signifies nothing".</p>
<p>Maybe the disagreement is over what "optional" means. Everyone agrees that there are Klingon suffixes which are optional, such as the plural suffixes on nouns when the verb prefix already indicates a noun is plural. You and others seem to believe that Type 7 verb suffixes are the same way. SuStel doesn't, and neither do I. I agree that such suffixes can (sometimes) be dropped even when describing an action which can be described using such a suffix, *however* (and unlike with the plural suffixes), dropping the suffix *changes the meaning* of what you're saying. It's more like the {lu-} prefix on verbs: it's required when the subject is plural, and if it's dropped, the meaning changes, but it gets dropped anyway without an intended change in meaning because people forget.</p>
<p>lojmIt tI'wI' nuv:<br>
> 2. Verbs with {-pu'} or {-ta'} refer only to actions that begin, proceed and end, all during the time period indicated by the time stamp. The perfective does not focus on the end point of the action. It implies the entire duration of the action.</p>
<p>This is a claim that I am less certain of, and I think the issue here is how much information from outside of the TKD one brings with him/her when reading it. </p>
<p>SuStel has been accused of bringing in information from other sources (like Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought") into the TKD which isn't actually there. But let's face it, we *all* do this. If we didn't know what "nouns", "verbs", or "suffixes" are, or if we didn't know what "tense" means, etc., we wouldn't understand the TKD at all. There is no disagreement about what "verb" or "noun" means, i.e., we all agree that when MO uses "verb" or "noun", he means exactly what everyone else uses those words to mean.</p>
<p>The issue here is then whether when MO says that {-pu'} indicates perfective aspect, he actually meant "perfective aspect" as it is typically understood by linguists. The description he gives in TKD is one sentence long and only says that it "indicates that an action is completed" (p.41). This is certainly *consistent* with the definition of "perfective aspect", but it leaves open whether he intended the Klingon {-pu'} suffix to have a characteristic (and perhaps the salient one) which "perspective aspect" typically has, which is to cause the entire action to be treated as a whole with no internal structure.</p>
<p>I happen to speak a language, Cantonese Chinese, which indicates aspect. Indeed, the aspect system in Cantonese is quite a bit more involved than the one in Klingon. There are at least four aspect markers which indicate that an action is completed: the perfective (the action is completed, and is treated as a whole), the completive (the action is completed, focusing on the completion), the exhaustive (the action is completed to the point that nothing more can be done), and the experiential (the action has been completed for the first time, is treated as a whole, and may no longer apply). The descriptions in brackets are what I came up with trying to summarise them.</p>
<p>I tried coming up with a bunch of Klingon sentences with and without the various aspect markers, then translating them into Cantonese and back, just to see how the aspect markers work. I should emphasise that I am not claiming any relation between the aspect markers in Klingon and in Cantonese, it's just an interesting exercise to bypass English, which doesn't have aspect markers, for thinking about aspect in Klingon.</p>
<p>I found that I would use a different aspect marker in Cantonese for the same aspect marker in Klingon, depending on context and meaning, since aspect in Cantonese has finer gradations. </p>
<p>For example, if someone gave me a {chab}, and asked me if I've eaten it yet, I can answer:</p>
<p>"Two days ago, I eat (perfective) it." = I ate it two days ago, and furthermore, the entire action of my eating it took place two days ago</p>
<p>"Two days ago, I eat (completive) it." = I finished eating it two days ago, and I might've eaten parts of it earlier (also, I might've thrown parts of it away)</p>
<p>"Two days ago, I eat (exhaustive) it." = I finished eating it two days ago, I might've eaten parts of it earlier, and I ate all of it (I didn't throw any of it away)</p>
<p>You can't answer with the experiential, which would mean "Two days ago, I ate {chab} for the first time". I mean, you can say this sentence, but it isn't a valid answer to the question of whether you ate the {chab}. </p>
<p>You also can't answer with the unmarked "Two days ago, I eat it". Cantonese doesn't have tense, and if you said that without one of the aspect markers, it sounds like, "Two days ago, I (will) eat it", which makes no sense (unless you're a time traveller). Again, this isn't to say that {wa'Hu' vISop} is wrong in Klingon, but the analogous sentence is wrong in Cantonese. In Cantonese, it would have to be the equivalent of {wa'Hu' vISoppu'} or {wa'Hu' vISopta'}. There is at least a hint that Klingon may work the same way: on TKD p.40, it says that verbs without a Type 7 marker may be translated as the English future tense, but it says nothing about being abe to translate them into the past tense.</p>
<p>After going through the above exercise to clarify for myself what exactly the disagreement is, I think it's over whether {-pu'} acts like the perfective, or whether it's like the completive (or perhaps has shades of both?). On SuStel's side, MO actually used the word "perfective" to label {-pu'}, rather than, say, "completive" or another word entirely. He doesn't use technical vocabulary for {-ta'} "accomplished, done" and {-lI'} "in progress", describing them instead, and so the option was clearly open to him to label {-pu'} as, say, "completed". But "perfective" and "continuous" are actual technical terms for two aspects, and it's not unreasonable to think that he labeled them that way because that's actually what they indicate. If someone claims that when MO used a word in TKD in a way other than how they're commonly understood, I think the onus is on them to explain why they think this. OTOH, MO has made mistakes and has occasionally been sloppy, so it's not impossible either.</p>
<p>-- <br>
De'vID</p>
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