Re: Telek Verbs

Marcus Smith wrote:

> >Yihaa! Another active conlang! :)
> Is there anything else worth working on? :-) (My other
> conlang is accusative.)
Your absolutely right! Just drop your other conlang. :)

> > Anyway. On to your "problem". In Acehnese one actually marks
> > "sneeze", "cough" and "vomit" and similar verbs with A, since
> > it is seen as the element of volition is a negative or potential
> > one: the activities concerned can be inhibited, delayed or permitted,
> > if not completely controlled. The non-volitional derivatives, such
> > as "cough uncontrollably" imply a pathological lack of any control,
> > however limited.
> That's an interesting take on things.
Yes, isn't it? What I like the most is the verb _mabôk_ 'drunk'
which takes a Patient, since being drunk is seen as pathological.
Drunkenness is strictly forbidden in the Aceh culture and hence
not seen as something one does, but rather a bad state one can
be in.

> Right.  Verbs are fluid with the distinction running along control
> lines. Uncontrolled actions pattern with non-events, so "reside" and
> "be patient" are O-prefix verbs.  The word for "prudent" can take
> either class, with -A it means "act prudently" and with -O it means
> "be prudent".
Ah, of course. Why make the choise either/or when you can have
both? :)

So Telek is a "classic" active lang with the main distinction
being control. (At least most of the North American native
langs seem to mainly have that distinction and Telek seems
very inspired by them.)

> Thanks, I'll take a look at that. I'm slowly working on a theory
> of active marking -- I'm not satisfied by any of the accounts I've
> seen so far in the literature.
Really? That sounds very interesting! So what have you come up
with? It seems that generativists have problems with it since all
the literature I've read about it take a very functionalistic
approach. Except Role and Reference grammar-fans, of course,
but they aren't very chomskyan in this matter, imho.

Oh, and check out Mark Durie if you haven't already. He has written
lots on Acehnese. I can recommend "Preferred argument structure in
an active language" in Lingua 74 (1998). He takes an interesting
approach and discusses how discourse factors effect the argument
structure. Very eye-opening.

> > Interesting! Any chance the "activity" affects the syntax of Telek?
> > For example, in Acehnese the verb "want" requires A - A coreference
> > between the clauses. How do you handle these things? (Don't tell
> > me it will come with your posting on syntax! ;)
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.  Are you asking whether
> or not there are restrictions/conditions on imbedded or conjoined
> clauses based on the active-stative distinction?
Yes, exactly.

> If I understand you right, it would be impossible in Acehnese to
> say "He wants to die" because there would be coreference, but the
> embedded sentence would not have an agent.  Also, "I want him to
> run" would be impossible, because there is no coreference between
> the agents. These concept would require a complicated structure.
Yes, you have it right. The Acehnese syntax seems very foreign
to my eyes. But very interesting! The examples that I have states
that "He wants to go" is okey, but "He wants to fall" is not.
(Perhaps not very strange afterall, since the semantics makes
it very weird to have "want" and then something involuntary.)

But when Durie goes into syntactic things like the equi NP
deletion above, equi control in serial resultative constructions,
that only 2p can be addressees of direct imperatives and that all
these things have something to do with how the clitics are placed,
I'm lost somewhere in the middle. ;)

> "Want" is a vit exceptional in this respect.  In most situations, coreference
> between clauses is by use of a switch-reference system -- which is embedded in
> a discourse tracking system.  I meant to include a description of it in the
> last post, but forgot to.  (I forgot passives too.)
Oh, passives! And do you have an anti-passive too?

> Same subjects between clauses are marked with one set of suffixes
> (the last in the verb complex), and different subjects are marked
> with another set.  The switch-reference marking may only be used
> when there is a connection between both clauses.  I could say
> "He went to the store and he bought food" useing SR, but not "He is my
> brother and he bought a car."  Except under special circumstances, there is no
> connection between being my brother and buying something.
That's neat. So does the 'activity' influence this in any way?
Like e.g. only patients or agents can be coreferenced?

> I'd explain in detail, but I have a difficult midterm to study for.
> Neurolinguistics -- what was I thinking? :-)
Neurolinguistics?!? And I thought Psycholinguistics was bad enough! ;)

Daniel