tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Mar 11 08:58:55 1999

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RE: Placement of aspect suffixes


jatlh peHruS:

> =====================
> Partitive affects aspect, in particular the imperfective.

Not in Klingon.  At least, not so far as we've seen, or that I can recall.  If you believe
that partitive constructions in Klingon are related to aspect in Klingon, I'm very
interested to hear your arguments.  If you're just observing that, in some other language,
partitives are related to aspect, well, go join *that* language's list.

> 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.

I doubt Comrie was considering Klingon.  Sometimes I don't think you're considering
Klingon either.

> 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.

I'm not sure what your point is.  Okay, we seem to agree that Klingon has four aspect
markers, indicating "completion" and "continuous" (divided into intentional and not).  I
don't care what you call them, but I suspect the terms you are using carry more meaning
for you than is appropriate for our discussion of Klingon, which is why I carefully avoid
them.  We seem to agree that there's no evidence that the partitive is at all related to
aspect in Klingon.  So, my question is still, What (not where) on Kronos does the
partitive have to with aspect.  I will now add the qualifier "IN KLINGON."  What on Kronos
does the partitive have to do with aspect in Klingon?

> 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.

You're making a lot of noise, but I'm getting very little signal.  By which I mean, you
seem to be arguing in a circle by yourself about things which have neither come up before,
nor seem relevant to the discussion at hand.  Ingression?  Punctuality?

You really seem hung up on terminology.  Stop scouring your linguistics texts for
constructions that don't have direct analogues in Klingon.  Let's talk about how to
express an idea in Klingon, not on how Klingon lacks this aspect or that one.

> peHruS

-- Holtej 'utlh

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