tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Jan 04 21:08:40 2010

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Re: qoSwIj

David Trimboli ([email protected]) [KLI Member] [Hol po'wI']

On 1/4/2010 10:51 PM, Christopher Doty wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 19:40, David Trimboli<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>
>> TKD defines "adverbial" to be a specific list of words, and {DaHjaj}
>> isn't one of them.
>
> Well, actually, TKD defines an adverbial a word that "usually come[s]
> at the beginning of a sentence and describe[s] the manner of the
> activity."  A list then follows, but nowhere does it say that this
> list is complete or exhaustive.

See my other message for my explanation about looking at the word lists.

>> (Yes, it behaves as an
>> "adverbial" in the general linguistic sense, but that's not what we're
>> talking about here.)
>
> What are we talking about, then?  The example you give from TKW
> clearly has<DaHjaj>  acting as an adverbial:
>
>>     DaHjaj SuvwI''e' jIH.
>>     Today I am a warrior. (TKW 203)
>
> This is ungrammatical with everything we know about
> predicate-nominals, unless<DaHjaj>  is an adverbial...

No. Nouns can also come before the OVS part of the sentence. Usually 
they have Type 5 suffixes to indicate their meaning, but this is not 
required. We also know that nouns indicating times can come at the 
beginning with no inflections. Specifically, they "precede the adverb" 
(TKD p. 179). TKD 6.7 is all about the placement of adverbials, and it 
says that a noun or phrase indicating a time element comes before the 
adverbial.

We have many examples of nouns used as time stamps, and they all come at 
the beginning. I'm not going to try to find them all, but they include 
{DaHjaj}, {wa'Hu'}, {wa'leS}, and {vagh rep}.

-- 
SuStel
http://www.trimboli.name/

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