Re: Trigger language question concerning the use of "to be"

This seems to have generated quite a few replies, but as far as I can see
most are concerned with different meanings of "to be" in English (which it
certainly has).

On Sunday, May 8, 2005, at 09:57 , Alex J. Man wrote:

> Okay, I've been developing a language that uses a trigger system and
> have decided that there will be no "to be."
In the proper sense of the word, triggering is commonplace in many (most?)
languages, for example the pronoun "I" triggers the form "am" (and not "is"
  or "are") in English. But I assume from the subject line - and indeed you
make this clear later in your mail - you are referring to the type of
construction found in Tagalog and related languages.

One point I think worth mentioning is that the 'trigger' analysis is not
the only way of analyzing this construction nor, I understand, the one
actually favored by Tagalog linguists themselves. In my recent mail on the
"Tagalog discussion" thread I refer to the analysis of Paz Naylor - and
this approach is by no means just hers. This has no reference to triggers
or triggering.

> State verbs,
> particularly, replace its role. Eg, He is good would be translated as
> He goods.
Cf. Paz Naylor's example:
    Maganda     ang babae
STATIVE-beauty NOM woman

In her analysis, Tagalog is reckoned not to have syntactic verbs, but
quasi-verb nouns. 'maganda' is, in this analysis, a noun denoting the
stative concept of being beautiful. To quote her:
"Schachter and Otanes (1972), Naylor (1980), Ferrell and Stanley (1980)
and others have pointed out that Tagalog and/or Philippine-type sentence
structure is like an equation, it is thus _bipartite_ and one nucleus
constituent _equates_ with the other and the two are joined by parataxis."

Elsewhere in her paper she refers to the two parts as the Comment and
Topic; 'ang' is the topic marker which she refers to as 'nom' (i.e. the
nominative marker).

> However, I have come across the problem when addressing
> infinitives. How, exactly, would a sentence such as "To defend is to
> attack" for example be handled in this case? Both words are
> infinitives, leaving no place for a verb to exist.
Yes, but what the problem, unless of course you also have the same problem
with "The woman is a teacher." Both 'woman' and 'teacher' are nouns.
Similarly an infinitive or gerund is a verbal _noun_, cf. Latin: defendere
est oppugnare.

As Paz Naylor and others do not regard Tagalog as having syntactic verbs,
"leaving no place for a verb to exist" is not a problem    :)

Titser  ang babae
teacher NOM woman = The woman is a teacher

has exactly the same form as:
Maganda ang babae = The woman is beautiful

and:
    Umalis     ang babae = The woman left.
leave.AF.COMP NOM. woman  [AF = actor focus; COMP = completive]


> Is there a
> grammatical way around this problem?
Same as for "The teacher is a woman".

[snip]
> To be safe, I'll provide a little background information on Valruzi.
> Valruzi utilizes a trigger system, like tagalog, in which nouns are
> marked as either trigger, oblique, genitive, agentive, or patientive.
> the case or role of the trigger, or focus, is marked on the verb.
Yep - this is a common way of explaining the Tagalog structure - but it
ain't the only one (and calling the noun that triggers the form the 'focus'
  causes confusions as some - e.g. Paz Naylor - called it the 'topic' and
the others call it the 'subject'; it is not the meaning of 'focus' when
generally used linguistics). But it is not the only way of explaining it.

> This eliminates the need for active/passive or
> transitive/intransitive.
Yep - it does - but it creates other needs   :)

> The language also has eliminated to
> verb, "to have" in a sense - translating sentences such as "I have a
> car" as "My cars exists" (dubbed existence sentences).
Yes, there is natlang precedence for that.

> Gerunds and participles are also utilized extensively.
Well, as On Sunday, May 8, 2005, at 11:09 , Roger Mills wrote:
[sni]
> I think you answer your own question later on: "Gerunds and
> participles are also utilized extensively." So use the gerund form, or
> some other nominal derivative, like "defense".
If you have gerunds, then use them in exactly the same way as you would in
a sentence such as "The teacher is a woman" - I assume the latter does
have a Valruzi equivalent.
The woman (is) a teacher
Defending (is) attacking

Or, possibly, as Roger suggested:
Defense (is) attack.

> In addition there are
> three aspects that CAN be infixed: inchoative (entering a state),
> inceptive (beginning an activity), or cessative (stopping). Three
> tenses: present, future, and past are used. whew, sorry if that's a
> bit lengthy, but this is my first post and I decided to play it safe
> and give some background info on the subject.
Sounds interesting - I hope the above is not too confusing and does help
  :)

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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