tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Mar 10 22:19:30 1999

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Re: Placement of aspect suffixes



In a message dated 3/5/1999 7:38:54 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
[email protected] writes:

<< What on Kronos do partitives have to do with aspect?  A partitive is
typically a noun
 phrase that identifies, with a presuppositional interpretation, a "part" of a
group.
 "Three of the officers," "all of the targs," and so on.  What does this have
to do with
 aspect?
 
 Aspect is a state of completion.  A state.  Of completion.  Is it completed,
or is it
 ongoing, from the perspective of the current time stamp?  Klingon further
distinguishes
 between whether the state of completion is a known goal.  That's really all
there is to
 it.  Any other difficulties are being introduced by your attempts to map this
onto other
 languages, or other terminology that may or may not mean the same thing.
  >>
=====================
Partitive affects aspect, in particular the imperfective.  Your definition of
Aspect is so good it should be on the FAQ.  However, even though we have not
discovered sentences in Klingon that have partitive periphrases to distinguish
"when within the complete time frame the state of completion occurred," my
textbook "Aspect" by Bernard Comrie points out it is important.  Where on
Kronos does this apply?  Good question.   Kronos has a language which has been
proven to have two types of Aspect only, perfective and imperfective,
subdivided into intentionality and known goal.  No other forms of Aspect have
been proven:  Habituality, Ingression, Punctuality, Duration.  Even if I point
out that ingression has been shown in Klingon, we readily see that Klingon
grammarians do not classify it as Aspect.  Rather, the ingressive marker is
{-choH}, which obviously is not a type 7.

peHruS



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