tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Dec 14 06:34:20 1993
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something weird about imperatives
- From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
- Subject: something weird about imperatives
- Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1993 09:33:57 -0500
- In-Reply-To: Marnen Laibow-Koser 's message of Mon, 13 Dec 93 19:56:01 EST <[email protected]>
>From: [email protected] (Marnen Laibow-Koser )
>Date: Mon, 13 Dec 93 19:56:01 EST
>Doch tlha' jatlhta' Guido#1:
>:
[using yI- in first-person imperatives]
>Interesting, but I don't think I like it. While pronouns are not wrong in
>conjunction with a verbal prefix, as I read the rules they cannot *contradict*
>the prefix. Imperatives are weird in just about every language I know (except
>perhaps Lojban), because of the very nature of the beast: they have an object
>and an addressee, but no real subject. [This is ad hoc; I don't know if someone
>more versed in linguistic theory would say otherwise.]
Oh, they have a subject, in most languages, it's just usually implicit.
When I was taught to diagram sentences, commands always had "(you)" in the
subject slot. And many languages at least allow the pronoun optionally.
That's why I, too, opposed "yI-" for putative first-person imperatives:
Even if they exist, who's to say it's the right prefix?
~mark