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Absolute constructions

From:caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>
Date:Friday, April 15, 2005, 15:00
In the most recent issue of "The Journal of Indo-European Studies" is
an article entitled "Absolute Constructions in Slavic: Case Diversity
and Orginality" by Daniela S. Hristova.

It was fascinating to learn that different IE languages use different
cases for their absolutes.  Slavic uses the dative, Latin uses the
ablative, Sanskrit uses the locative, and Greek the genitive.  The
purpose of the article was to demonstrate that absolute constructions
in the Slavic languages were in the dative case and not some other
construction.  With her data, the author supports the assumption that
absolute constructions in the daughter languages are inherited from
the protolanguage.

With this in mind, I want to add absolute constructions to Senyecan.
And since these constructions occur in different cases in the
daughter languages, I feel I can have several different forms of the
absolute construction to express nuances.

I have three pairs of parameters with which to work: present and past
tenses, perfective and imperfective aspects, and stative and motive
cases.  Any suggestions on how to realize these in my conlang would
be greatly appreciated.  For example, an imperfective participle in
the construction could indicate that the action is going on at the
same time as the verb in the main clause, while the perfective would
indicate that it was completed before the time of the main verb.

Charlie
http://wiki.frath.net/user:caeruleancentaur

Reply

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>