tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jan 12 09:25:50 2006

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Re: transitivity

Terrence Donnelly ([email protected]) [KLI Member] 

--- QeS 'utlh <[email protected]> wrote:

> ghItlhpu' ter'eS, ja':
> >I don't follow this.  When did Okrand say that
> >{yIn}
> >is bivalent?
> 
> jangpu' DloraH:
> >He signed my KGT [tlhIngan yIn DayIn].  I don't
> >remember now what he said
> >afterwards, but I remember taking it as a hint that
> >this was not completely
> >grammatical but /could/ be said.
> 
> As well as the signing of DloraH's KGT, Okrand
> explicitly said in HolQeD 
> 7.4:
> 
> "For example, I've used the word {yIn} transitively.
> "You live a Klingon 
> life." That's perfectly acceptable in Klingon. It's
> perfectly acceptable in 
> English, too, but it is not obvious from the short
> definition in the 
> dictionary that that would be an okay thing to do."
> (Okrand to charghwI', 
> HolQeD 7.4)
> 
> >Why do you say that any non-stative can take an
> >object?
> 
> "He flew a short flight". "He slept the sleep of the
> dead". Going from what 
> Okrand said in this interview, it seems like those
> could theoretically work 
> in Klingon, too, but in practice it doesn't happen
> that way:
> 
> "The other tricky thing is some people say you can
> put any prefix on any 
> verb. I suppose that you can, but just because you
> can doesn't mean that you 
> should." (Okrand to charghwI', HolQeD 7.4)
> 

My problem with this is that virtually any verb could
then
be construed to have the maximally allowed number of
arguments
in the given language, but in the vast majority of
cases, 
most of these arguments wouldn't be expressed.  This
seems
enormously inefficient to me. It seems more likely to
me
that a verb has a prototypical number of arguments at
the
semantic level, which (for efficiency's sake) would be
the
minimum number needed for normal communication, i.e.,
the
number of arguments that native speakers of the
language
typically think are necessary to express the typical
meaning
of the verb. Operations that change the valency of
this
prototypical number would be possible, but not common,
and
would be highly marked. It makes more sense to me to
think of
{yIn DayIn} as a marked valency raising operation of
the 
prototypical univalent verb {yIn}, than to think that
{yIn}
is really semantically bivalent but just happens to be
used
as a grammatical univalent 90% of the time.

I interpret Okrand's remarks as supporting the idea
that this
kind of valency-increasing is grammatically possible,
but
highly marked.  To me "live a Klingon life" is
possible in
English, but as highly marked in English as (I
believe) it
is in Klingon (I don't immediately think "Live what?"
when
confronted with the verb "to live").  And I think it
follows
that some usages would be so highly marked (i.e.,
weird) that
nobody would do them in normal discourse ("just
because you
can doesn't mean that you should.").

> >For that matter, why do you call {Qong} a
> non-stative?
> 
> Read "stative" as "able to be used adjectivally". I
> thoroughly reject, for 
> instance, *{jIH Qong law' SoH Qong rap} "I slept as
> much as you".
>

Actually, that looks pretty tempting..., but you're
right,
{Qong} isn't an adjective. I think I'm using some
wrong terminology.  While all statives are
intransitive, not all intransitives are stative, but I
forget the term for them.
 
> QeS 'utlh

-- ter'eS

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