tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jul 12 22:33:22 2000
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RE: Deixis and direction
ja' charghwI':
>[...]
>It's like saying that, well, yes, it quacks like a duck and walks like a
>duck, but it is really a very special kind of flying, swimming cow that can
>only be used in settings appropriate for a duck.
If I were to contrive an appropriate analogy from the other point of view,
I'd say that it is merely a generic flying animal that happens to quack and
waddle. Calling it a duck obscures its basic "flying animal" character and
implies that it's something distinct from a flying animal instead of a
variety of one. It's the fact that it quacks and waddles which lets it be
used in settings where a quacking, waddling animal is required. The label
of "duck" is useful to describe something which meets those requirements,
but being labeled a duck doesn't take away the fact that it's still a
flying animal.
Putting a Type 5 noun suffix on a noun doesn't make it something other than
a noun. Nouns can be used as subjects and objects. A careful reading of
TKD yields only the fact that nouns used as something else *usually* end in
a Type 5 suffix, with no explicit restriction on nouns with those suffixes
being used as a subject or object. It's only the label "Syntactic marker"
that makes us think they can never be used there. But we know locatives
fit as the object of some verbs because their meaning includes a locative
concept, and it's not that big of a stretch to imagine *{jorwI'vo' vIDoH}
working for a similar reason. If we take away the "syntactic marker"
label, we still never see a locative in the subject slot of a sentence for
the simple reason that none of the verbs we know has a locative concept as
its subject.
But we can't ignore the label completely. As I have pointed out
previously, Type 5 noun suffixes do have explicit characteristics that make
them unlike the other four types. They get put on adjectival verbs, and
they can't get used on the first noun of a noun-noun construction. So it
seems that something about ducks *does* make them unsuitable for roles that
only non-ducks may perform.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh