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Re: Telek Verbs

From:Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Date:Monday, May 8, 2000, 16:00
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