tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 10 22:15:05 1999
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Re: Deep structure
ja' ter'eS:
>I have to agree with charghwI'...
[a whole truckload of amazingly clear stuff snipped]
Oh, my. Listen closely for a minute...there. Did you hear that?
That bubbling noise followed by a satisfying "click" was a bunch
of amorphous jelly in my brain crystallizing into a clear and
beautiful understanding of exactly what charghwI' has been trying
to explain to me. ter'eS managed to use words that simultaneously
lack unnecessary grammatical baggage and convey clear ideas, and
that's worthy of a salute. ter'eS, qavan!
Now that I see it from this new and strangely familiar angle, I
find myself amazed that it took me so long to recognize it. It's
even fitting perfectly with my personal understanding of {-moH}
on *intransitive* verbs, and it's making that understanding more
clear while making the "prefix trick variation" part of it a lot
less necessary.
I'll summarize the single important point that I suddenly seem to
understand now:
When {-moH} is used, the beneficiary of the verb is
receiving the *causation*.
I'm still not *quite* convinced enough to switch to the other side
of the debate, but I'm sure going to stop arguing my old position.
The motorcycle analogy completely fails with me. Not because I
think it's wrong, but because I don't understand it. I have an
alternate analogy that I think fits the same way, but since I'm
not sure about the motorcycle I don't know if it really does fit.
How about this:
A verb is like a forklift. The driver is of course the subject,
and the object of the verb is the thing it moves around. Adding a
{-moH} makes the driver into the person causing an action to occur,
but it still needs a way to say who's actually being made to effect
the action -- so the "agent of action" gets to sit in a trailer
behind the forklift. The trailer is marked {-vaD}, since its
occupant is receiving the causation of the action.
I shouldn't go on, but I think this analogy also works for more
than transitive verbs. In the case of an intransitive verb, there
is no separate object, and the purpose of the forklift is to move
around the driver himself. Putting a {-moH} on the verb either
lets the driver move something else around, or lets the driver
make something else move around. Both of these interpretations
are rather similar in their actual result, so it probably is okay
to use either an object or a beneficiary for the same meaning.
Wow, that was exciting.
The only thing that isn't completely clear to me is how to make
this analogy work with an idea like {'unvaD qul vItujmoH}. It's
using the {-vaD} to indicate the beneficiary of the action, not
the beneficiary of the causation. I'm having a hard time dealing
with it in forklift terms. That's okay -- an analogy doesn't have
to fit *exactly*. It probably works because the {-moH}'s effect
is captured by the object noun and thus doesn't reach the {-vaD}
noun. With a transitive verb, the object noun is already filling
a role for the root meaning, and the {-moH} can't stick to it.
Gosh. This suddenly seems so obvious. I'm impressed.
-- ghunchu'wI'