tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Sep 20 08:05:34 2007
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Re: Positioning for emphasis
Qov wrote:
> > 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?
>
>I was going to just leave this subject alone, having given my
>thoughts on it, but I can't resist pointing out that "who on *Earth*"
>is not what we're concerned about. Just because it's connectable,
>doesn't mean it is a valid utterance in the language. "He hit the
>officer, the child" is interpretable in English, and it is something
>that might come out of someone's mouth in a breathless recounting of
>an incident, but it's not a construct anyone would argue for.
Voragh (quoting himself):
>I can only find three examples of fronting the topic in Klingon:
>
> cheng'e' DaH yISam
> Find Chang. ST6
>
> HaqwI''e' DaH yISam
> Find the surgeon now! TKD
>
>Note that these are variants of the same sentence. Note too that it's the
>object that's fronted before the adverbial, not the subject. Alternate
>translations (with different punctuation) rendering the marked flavor or
>the Klingon might be "Chang... find him now!" or "A/The surgeon! Find him
>now!"
I too was going to leave this subject alone, but I feel compelled to remind
everyone that the example which triggered this long discussion was an
emotional outburst heard during the confusion of the surprise attack on
Kronos One. (The second example is really only the line from ST6 revised
slightly for TKD.) This is perfectly in line with Qov's "breathless
recounting of an incident" theory. Granted that it was understood by all
present, but it's certainly not standard grammar by any means. Qov is
perfectly right: "it's not a construct anyone would argue for".
Okrand discusses this in the TKD Addendum in the section titled "Placement
of adverbial elements" (TKD 179-80):
It was earlier thought that all adverbials (except {neH} "only")
come at the beginning of the sentence. This is frequently the
case, but what is really going on is that the adverbial
precedes the object-verb-noun construction. It is possible
for an element of another type to precede the adverb. [...]
The adverbial may actually follow the object noun (but
still precede the verb) when the object noun is topicalized by
means of the nouns suffix {-'e'} (see Section 3.3.5):
(HaqwI''e' DaH yISam) "Find the SURGEON now!"
Note that Okrand says that it is the *object* noun which is topicalized and
shifted to the front of the sentence (actually, he only says it precedes
the adverbial), NOT the subject. Note too that it only happens with
adverbials.
--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons