tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue May 09 15:20:50 1995
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: Transitivity
On Mon, 8 May 1995 17:09:01 -0400, "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email protected]> said:
> [...] I was slightly misunderstood when I said that "participate"
> is transitive in English, with the object in locative. Obviously,
> *syntactically* it's intransitive. My point was that *semantically*,
> in *meaning*, "participate" always had an object, at least implied.
majQa', _Mark_! <touches left shoulder with right hand, then folds
right hand in fist in front of chest> DaHjaj Holtej SoH.
Transitivity is a mighty matter of debate among linguists, SuvwI'pu' quv.
It has been the primary subject of many books and articles and a secondary
one in many others (such as my PhD thesis, to be submitted very soon :-)).
So no reason to worry if we fail to reach a definite conclusion now. :-)
> That's why I support a transitive "jeS" with the object being
> the activity participated in.
Note that _participate in the game_ is very close to _join the game_,
and _join_ is transitive. You're quite right; not everything that
could be an object actually becomes one.
> What about intransitive verbs? Krankor (with some degree of
> correctness IMO), maintains that the transitive/intransitive
> distinction is artificial in Klingon.
Well, you yourself said that _participate_ is semantically transitive,
and therefore potentially syntactically transitive, because the action
it denotes involves two entities. Clearly there are eventualities (an
umbrella term for states and events) which involve only one.
> That "Qong" can be transitive too, we just don't know
> what meaning its object would carry.
maj. Having accepted the premise that all verbs in Klingon can have
an object, I propose to call a verb `red' if we know what meaning its
object carries (eg {HoH}, {Sop}) and `green' if we do not (eg {Qong}).
Or should we rather call the red verbs transitive and the green ones
intransitive, just to honour the tradition?
> Perhaps it's meaningful to say "?rav vIQong" with the object
> of "Qong" being the surface the person or animal slept on
> (why not with -Daq? Who knows, the language is strange).
Every language is strange in its own way, but although variation tends
to be great, it tends not to be random. That is, there is a universal
reason for which languages are loath to equate the surface of sleeping
with the victim of killing. Any event can have a location; that isn't
a central component of the semantics of the predicate. That's why, as
a general rule, locations are adjuncts (oblique terms), not arguments.
> In Loglan (not Lojban), the "object" of the predicate analogous to
> "tIn" is something the subject is bigger than, which would therefore
> do away with law'/puS and in the normal sense would leave it elided:
> bigger than something I'm not talking about.
Maybe the object of {tIn} should be something the subject is as big as,
doing away with the concerns about how to say `as big as a spaceship',
and elision would yield `as big as something (else)'.
> I certainly can believe that there are intransitive verbs
> that take objects with meanings we might not expect.
Of course. But would the language go out of its way to promote an
adjunct to an object for every intransitive verb merely for the sake
of making all verbs transitive?
--'Iwvan