Re: motion verbs in Tokana

Jim Grossmann wrote:

>>>Matt:
>>>> I've now added a third category of motion verbs which
>>> conflate both manner and trajectory.  These verbs are
>>> formed by prefixing one of the trajectory verbs with a
>>> "manner prefix", where the manner prefixes are
>>> derived in quasi-regular fashion from the manner verbs:
>>[...]
>>> What do people think?
>
>Why not compound verbs?   I don't understand why one of the two types has to
>be a prefix.   For that matter, I'm unclear about the difference between
>your scheme and compounding, other than the invarient "manner + trajectory"
>order, and possible morphological changes in the "prefix" that I don't know
>about.
Well, there *are* morphological changes to the "prefix" that you don't
know about--in some cases rather radical changes.  For example, the
verb meaning "run to" is "penta", while the bound morpheme meaning
"running" is "pa-".  (I remain agnostic on whether "pa-" is a reduced
form of "penta", or whether "penta" is an irregular formation from
"pa-" + "eta" = "go to".)

As far as whether we're talking about prefixing or compounding, I really
don't care what you call it.  But if it's compounding, then the first
element in the compound sometimes undergoes radical phonological
alteration, as in the above example.

>You could vary the order of the roots for stylistic purposes.
>
>sneak + enter = sneak in                 enter + sneak = enter
>surreptitiously
>chug + exit = chug out                      exit + chug = exit with the
>sound of active machinery
I don't really understand the semantic differences here.

As a general response to your comments and And's:  I think there
may have been a misunderstanding here.  I was merely presenting
a scheme for *grammaticalising* different conflations of manner
and trajectory--for deriving new lexical items.  The language also
provides other means of expressing events where both manner
and trajectory are specified:  For example, you could use a manner
verb together with a locative noun expressing a spatial relation.
The following two sentences, for example, are roughly synonymous:

   Na pa-lhuye-i kotoi
   he running-entered-the room:DAT
   "He ran into the room"
   lit. "He entered the room runningly"

   Na pente-i himai kotu
   he ran-the interior:DAT room
   "He ran into the room"
   lit. "He ran to the room('s) interior"

Matt.