Re: Vjatjackwa (the result of all those sound changes!)

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 10:43:14PM -0500, Isidora Zamora wrote:

> At 08:59 PM 12/14/03 -0500, Amanda wrote:
> >Yay, more opportunities to write about this!  (I drove 3 hours to go
> >take a final exam this weekend, and it was cancelled due to snow.  Real
> >Life getting in the way of conlanging.)
>
> Ouch!  You poor thing.  That's a lot of driving in the snow for nothing.
Well, it wasn't as bad as it sounds.  I drove down before the snow,
stayed overnight at my parents', and drove back up after the snow.
Note that the snow was only there for a few hours.  For this they
cancelled my final? :)

> In order that I may fully understand the solution that you came up with,
> could you please explain applicatives to me?  Thanks.
Well, I read about this the other day in Describing Morphosyntax, but
I may have gotten it confused since then.  I hope someone will correct
me if I get this wrong...

Applicatives promote an oblique argument of the verb to the direct
object position.  I do not think they are restricted to intransitive
verbs, although the things I'm calling "applicatives" in Witicku will
be.  Basically, they change the meaning of the verb in a way that in
English would involve a preposition - changing "give (something)" to
"give to (someone)", for example; changing "report (something)" to
"brief (someone)", changing "go (somewhere, by some road)" to "travel
(some road)".  This is done via a bound morpheme on the verb.

> (The other reason to
> explain applicatives to me is simply so that I will understand what they
> are.  This is obviously something essential that got left out of my
> education. <sigh>  It's amazing how many essential things I have never
> heard of before.)
I learned way more on this list than I did in my two linguistics classes
in college :)

> BTW, I've been having fun reading your posts lately.  Lots of cool stuff.
Thanks!  After I got settled in at my new job up here, I started
catching up on the September-October archives and was quite interested
to see the birth of Cwendaso occurring on-list - I'd read the more
recent posts about it first, so that was very interesting.

Amanda

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