tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jun 10 08:19:15 1998

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RE: RE: Infinitives and Subjects (was RE: Online Lexicon of Linguistic Terminology)


> > chay' pIm *impersonal* mojaq {-lu'} je?
>
> qechmeywIj vImuch 'e' vInID.  jIQubtaHvIS, jIghItlh.  vIrInDI', pImbe'
> Datu'. HIma'.  laDtaH jaqwI' neH!

QInwIj vIngeHmo' jIQub 'e' vImevbe'.

Since we're talking about Klingon grammar again, and for clarity, I'll
switch to English.  I want to ammend my previous comments on the difference
between the impersonal verb form and /-lu'/.

Impersonal verbs occur only in third person singular forms, have no
specified agent, and hence have a dummy subject or no subject at all.  I've
looked this up in my dictionary of grammar terminology; it describes typical
examples as weather verbs!  They take dummy subjects (what I called
"expletives" in my previous post; that's better than the term that's more
familiar to me, which is "pleonastic").

Tangent: Given Okrand's recent description of weather terms, it sounds like
they are not, in fact, impersonal, but that they just have ellipsed
subjects.

However, I think the syntactic description of impersonal verb forms is still
apt.  Like with /ghojmeH taj/.  Who's learning?  It's not the knife; that's
not the subject.  My gut reaction is that this isn't an ellipsed pronoun,
but a missing, unstated pronoun.  I don't think that means the verb form is
not conjugated (which is the implication of calling it "infinitive", whether
you believe that's restricted to tense or not).  I think it's a normal,
third-person verb form which happens not to assign an AGENT role; i.e.,
impersonal.

The other two examples from TKD,

	ja'chuqmeH rojHom neH jaghla'
	jagh luHoHmeH jagh lunejtaH

are more interesting.  Well, the first one is.  Is it "...in order to
confer", or is it "in order that they confer"?  If it's the former, it's
impersonal.  If it's the latter, it's just normal ellipsis.

As for the difference between impersonal forms and /-lu'/, verbs with /-lu/
are not restricted to third-person subjects (though I suppose one could
argue that they are, after the pronoun switch), and of course there's the
switching of the pronoun prefix.  In English grammar "indefinite" refers to
NPs ("the dog" vs. "a dog"), not to verbs; in my previous post I had
commented that perhaps Okrand mis-labeled indefinite verbs (with /-lu'/) by
focusing on the effect it had on the NP rather than the change in the verb.
I take it back.  Indefinite verb is a perfect term, because it describes
more than the process of making the subject indefinite.  It describes (1)
restricting the prefix choice, (2) switching the prefix reference, and (3)
applying arbitrary reference to the unstated subject (i.e., indefiniteness).
That's a lot of work for one verb form, focusing on the indefiniteness of
the subject is too narrow.

Most of this rambling has been for my benefit, to get the ideas straight in
my head.  Sorry if it's incoherent.  So, I think the question raised by this
discussion is this: are forms like /ghojmeH/ in /ghojmeH taj/ and
/ja'chuqmeH/ in /ja'chuqmeH rojHom/ impersonal or unconjugated (infinitive
if you like; I surrender the notion of tense); or do they simply have
ellipsed subjects (which I tend to doubt).  If they're impersonal, then
they're in 3rd-person but assign no subject role; if they're unconjugated,
well I didn't think there was any such thing in Klingon!  That was the big
headache with /taH pagh taHbe'/, for instance.    In Chomskian syntax, I'd
tell the difference between impersonal and infinitive by testing both tense
and case assignment, both of which we don't see in Klingon.

Part of the problem might be that we're using terms from Terran linguistics
to describe Klingon grammar.  As I showed in my previous post, infinitives
can have subjects in English.  Impersonal verbs have no subjects, or dummy
subjects; what's important is that they don't assign subject roles (like
AGENT).  In English, saying a verb is infinitive has no bearing on whether
it assigns its subject role.  It was this misuse of infinitive that got me
going.  Is the distinction significant in Klingon?  Well, before today I had
lived comfortably with the belief that all Klingon verbs were conjugated
with person & number.  If /ghojmeH/ is not 3rd-person, it's strikingly
different from a fundamental belief I had about Klingon.  If it's
impersonal, it's a new verb form, but not fundamentally at odds with the
basic nature of Klingon.

And in the end it all seems so insignificant, I wonder why I've gone on at
such great length about it.

> > charghwI'
>
> --Holtej

--Holtej

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