At 5/8/00 09:52 AM -0500, you wrote:
>This appears to be contradicted by your example of intransitive subject
>incorporation, "aba'-axin", which you gloss as "THE pole is red". Is
>the gloss incorrect (it should be "a pole is red" or "there's a red pole"),
>or are intransitive subjects an exception?
Oops. That was a bad gloss. But now that I look at it, I like that
definite.
Maybe I'll repeal the rule and chalk the inalienable problem up to the
requirement that they have possessive morphology. Back to the drawing board.
>>I'm stuck with that last point. Anything that is possessed is definite.
This
>>would mean that inalienably possessed things cannot be incorporated. I
really
>>think the expression "have a headache" contains the verb "head-hurt", but
>>"head" is inalienably possessed. I'm also pretty sure that I cannot say
>>"for-my-mother-cook". I'm not sure of a good place to draw the line between
>>what can and what cannot incorporate. Does anybody have any idea about
>>how I
>>can resolve this?
>
>One place to draw the line would be between inalienably possessed nouns
>which stand in a part-to-whole relation to the possessor (body parts,
>abstract properties) and inalienably possessed nouns which denote
>a separate entity bearing a particular relation to the posessor (kinship
>terms, etc.). Perhaps the former can incorporate but the latter
>can't. Having a syntactic difference between part-to-whole and
>relational possession which cross-cuts the morphological difference
>between alienable and inalienable possession might be a nice (certainly
>realistic) feature to have in Telek.
Very good idea. I think I'll adopt it.
Marcus