tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Sep 19 19:53:06 2007
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Re: Positioning for emphasis
Doq wrote:
> There is no such thing as a "semantic subject". The word "subject" is
> a grammatical term. It describes a grammatical role. There is no
> semantic role in a sentence. The semantics of a word have to do with
> the meaning of the word, not its grammatical role in a particular
> sentence.
/Semantics/ and /syntax/ are two subfields of /grammar/. Semantics
refers to meaning expressed by language; syntax refers to the structure
of language. Something can be "grammatical" in that it follows rules of
syntax, or it can be "grammatical" in that it follows rules of semantics
(or other sets of rules, such as morphology and pragmatics).
Syntactically speaking, it is completely correct that {puq'e'} in
{puq'e' yaS qIp} is not a subject, it is a header. Semantically
speaking, {puq'e'} is in the role of the topic of the sentence, made
explicit with its {-'e'} suffix. Regardless of its syntactic role,
{puq'e'}'s semantic role is that of sentence topic.
When given a sentence like {puq'e' yaS qIp} it /is/ possible that the
child isn't doing the hitting — but I'd lay odds that he is. Whether you
want to call this a "subject" or not is irrelevant; it's fairly obvious
who is doing what in this sentence.
I'm going to tell you something about a child. Ready for a story
about a child? Here it is: He hit the officer.
Who on earth wouldn't make the connection?
Let's not forget English passive voice:
John threw the ball.
The ball was thrown by John.
In both sentences, the syntactic roles of /John/ and /the ball/ change
while their meanings do not. I'm not saying Klingon has voice or
prepositions; I'm just pointing out that words can have the same meaning
in sentences where they have different syntactic roles.
As for arguments that a language is about communication and certain list
members wouldn't make this semantic connection... I'm sorry, but that
argument is completely specious. You list elite who would call this a
barrier to communication — of course you haven't seen this "in the
wild": you taught most of the people you speak with! You gave them your
own biases of understanding. Get some native Klingon speakers, see what
they think about it, and /then/ I'll accept that argument. Otherwise
it's just circular.
No, {puq'e' yaS qIp} isn't a very good sentence, since one could
eliminate the question with {yaS qIp puq'e'}. But having an alternate
doesn't invalidate the construction. It may be useful for other reasons.
Here's another not-so-good sentence, but this one is only not-so-good
because it has no context: {puq'e' yaS qIp maghwI'} "As for the child,
the traitor hit the officer." Why is {puq'e'} the topic? I have no idea.
If the sentence were part of a story, we might have an idea, and it
might be a very good idea. But with this sentence alone we don't know if
the child is either the officer or the traitor, or someone else. Maybe
they're fighting for possession of the child? Maybe they're fighting
because the child is controlling them with insidious hypno-rays? Give me
a context, and that'll explain the topic.
"As for the rain, I started playing pinball yesterday."
By itself, it's meaningless. But if you know ahead of time that it
started raining yesterday and I have a magic pinball-triggered
rain-dance, suddenly the topic makes perfect sense.
> Consider that in Klingon, there are nouns, verbs and "everything
> else" (a.k.a. chuvmey). Similarly, nouns are either subjects,
> objects, or "everything else". This second type of "everything else"
> is a head noun.
The first sentence is attested by the presence of these words in the
Klingon vocabulary. The latter two sentences are only known to be
distinctions made by Federation linguists and list-members. We don't
know that Klingons make this second kind of distinction.
Just as Latin grammatical terms and rules often don't apply to English
(split infinitives, anyone?), English terms and rules often don't apply
to Klingon. Be careful when using them.
> The noun suffix {-'e'} is exceptional, in that it is the one Type 5
> for which we've got LOTS of examples of its use on subjects and
> objects.
But not the only one! And before we had those, everyone was pretty
convinced that you couldn't put them on subjects or objects.
SuStel
Stardate 7718.3