tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Dec 04 16:00:18 1995
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Re: intransitive verbs
- From: [email protected] (Alan Anderson)
- Subject: Re: intransitive verbs
- Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 19:00:49 -0500
marqem writes:
>...Verbs like yIt 'walk' or Qong
>'sleep' take no objects, but they don't describe states or qualities. You
>can say mang yoH 'a brave soldier', but not *mang Qong for 'a sleeping
>soldier' (the star is a linguistic symbol for an ungrammatical construction).
> You have to say Qongbogh mang, lit. 'a soldier who is sleeping'.
{Qong} is an interesting example, though. I've played around with changing
its gloss from "sleep" to "be asleep" and haven't found any occasions where
the meaning of a sentence changes. There's almost a justification for this
sort of experimentation; see {vIH} "move, be in motion". "Move" is clearly
intended to be intransitive, but it's not stative. "Be in motion", though,
IS stative. I thought some of the other intransitive verbs might yield to
this sort of technique, but {vem} "awaken" doesn't seem to have a stative
counterpart in English. It's quite definitely an intransitive action word.
-- ghunchu'wI' batlh Suvchugh vaj batlh SovchoH vaj