tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Sep 16 16:20:32 2007

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Re: Positioning for emphasis

QeS 'utlh ([email protected]) 

ghItlhpu' lay'tel SIvten, ja':
>"Regarding the child, he (someone else) hit the officer."  Context would 
>fill in the subject.

That's the problem; I can't think of any suitable context that wouldn't 
prefer some other type 5 suffix on {puq}. Perhaps it's just the verb {qIp}, 
though; I suppose {puqpu''e' ja'chuq chaH} "they talked to each other 
regarding the child" would work fine.

In retrospect, I guess I can see why {puq'e' yaS qIp ghaH} would be 
ungrammatical. In Klingon, free pronouns themselves serve to emphasise the 
subject, so {puq'e' yaS qIp ghaH}, even if one allowed {puq'e'} to be equal 
to {ghaH}, has two emphasised arguments, which implies that the two are not 
the same.

However, I'm very surprised that everyone deems {puq'e'} at the end of a 
sentence (i.e. in subject position) to be semantically different from 
{puq'e'} as a header. Why, and how, is {puq'e' yaS qIp} different from {yaS 
qIp puq'e'}? On top of that, direct objects apparently can be moved to 
header position without any such semantic change (viz. {HaqwI''e' DaH yISam} 
and {cheng'e' DaH Sam}). TKD (p. 180) says explicitly "the adverbial may 
follow the object noun" when the object noun is topicalised, but the 
relevant section discusses placement of adverbial elements. I believe the 
simplest explanation is not that the placement of the adverb is really 
changing, but that the object is being shifted to header position, 
especially considering that this change of adverb placement is said to occur 
with {-'e'}-marked objects only. Although we have no canon examples of 
{-'e'}-subject fronting, I don't see why this shift in position could occur 
with objects but not with subjects.

I think ghunchu'wI' and DloraH's explanation that {puq'e' yaS qIp} reads 
like "he or she hit the CHILD's officer" is flimsy. No Klingon would ever 
read it like that, whether punctuated or not, because of the rule 
prohibiting type 5 suffixes on the first noun of a noun-noun construction. 
For me at least, type 5 suffixes would serve as parsing signals, marking 
that you've reached the end of a noun phrase.

QeS 'utlh
tlhIngan Hol yejHaD pab po'wI' / Grammarian of the Klingon Language 
Institute


not nItoj Hemey ngo' juppu' ngo' je
(Old roads and old friends will never deceive you)
     - Ubykh Hol vIttlhegh

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