tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Aug 08 12:58:11 2002
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Re: adverbials
- From: Andrew Strader <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: adverbials
- Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 17:57:16 +0000
- Organization: Decode
qon tulwI':
>that wasn't my point. from my point of view, /rammo'/ is not a noun.
>(also in english you wouln't say that "due to the night" is a noun.)
>i meant the naked /ram/ that can occur in the header and in the OVS
>body.
I agree with this.
Marc schrieb:
>this (what you put in parentheses) is completely irrelevant.
>it's like saying <headers> is not a noun in english because
>of the suffix -s; in Klingon the suffix -mo' is not different
>from the suffix -mey in that respect (of course their semantics
>differ)
I know that it seems this way at first, but there is more to the matter than
that. The main problem is that -mo' is a fundamentally different kind of
suffix than -mey. -mo' and its kin are really better thought of as phrase
suffixes, rather than noun suffixes. (See TKD 4.4).
Why does -mo' seem like a noun suffix most of the time? Simply because Okrand
chose not to put any space between a word and a type 5 noun suffix. But
spaces or lacks thereof don't really carry any grammatical force. It could
very well have been "ram mo'". It is important to remember that the entire
phrase is what goes in the header position.
The bottom line is that a phrase like "rammo'" modifies the core OVS sentence
as a whole. That is, it's acting in an adverbial sense. And it just so
happens that adverbials occur in the "head" (or "header" if you like)
position of the sentence.
--
Andrew Strader