Re: Ke'kh - degrees of volition

On Wed, Sep 20, 2000 at 12:12:17AM +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
> Ah, degrees of volition!  And an interesting morphology.
Oooooh!! So *that's* what degrees of volition means! :-)
I'm having a hard time figuring out a good word to describe my
incidental/deliberative/consequential. I currently call it "focus", but
that doesn't sound very appropriate. Is "degrees of volition" an
"official" term for this concept? Or at least, a widely-understood term?
I'd like to adopt it if so.

>
> Admit that you have stolen the idea from Nur-ellen! ;-)
Well, I was seeing these huge threads about degrees of volition in active
languages not long ago, but I had no idea what it was referring to! Little
did I know that I already have the same concept in my own conlang :-)

[snip]
> Nur-ellen also grammaticalizes degrees of volition, though in a very
> different way, namely by using different cases and prepositions with the
> subject.
[snip]

Ah, this is interesting. The speakers of my conlang view things in a more
impersonal, 3rd-person type of way, so the main thing in a verbal sentence
is the verb, the main event. Hence, the degree of volition is associated
with the verb rather than the noun.

Of course, this also makes for some weird noun cases, but I'll save that
for my next tidbit post to the list :-)


T