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Re: Help with grammatical term

From:Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
Date:Sunday, August 24, 2008, 20:42
See
< http://wals.info/feature/52 >
"Comitatitive" has only one "m".

It says:
Prototypically, a comitative relator morpheme is employed to encode
accompaniment. An example is the Inga (Quechuan; Colombia) suffix -hua(n)
in (1a), where the 3rd person plural subject is the accompanee and
alcalde ‘mayor’ is the companion. An instrumental relator morpheme normally
marks a noun phrase as the instrument used by an agent in a given situation
to carry out the action designated by the lexical verb. An example is (1b),
where the same Inga case suffix connects the 3rd person plural agent with the
instrument caspi ‘stick’ used to carry out the action of measuring depths.

And goes on to say:
1.2 Differentiation.

The most frequent solution for the encoding of comitatives and instrumentals
obeys a pattern maximally different from that represented by identity.
Differentiation requires (at least) two different relators for comitative and
instrumental, neither of which can replace the other. This type clearly
dominates outside of Europe, although there are also some instances in the
Old World, e.g. (3).

(3) Finnish (Karlsson 1978: 125, 133)

a.
 Instrument: "Adessive -llä"


 Hän
 kirjoittaa
 kynä-llä.


 s/he
 write.3sg
 pen-with


 ‘S/he is writing with a pen.’

b.
 Accompaniment: "Comitative -ine"


 Läsnä
 oli
 V. V.
 vaimo-ine-en.


 near
 be.pst.3sg
 V. V.
 wife-with-poss.3


 ‘V. V. was present with his wife.’




In Finnish, there are two inflectional cases which divide up the domain of the
single relator of languages of the identity type. The so-called adessive serves
inter alia the function of marking instruments (e.g. kynällä ‘with (a/the) pen’ in
(3a)), whereas the inflectional comitative -ine- indicates accompaniment (e.g.
vaimoineen ‘with his wife’ in (3b)). (In recent years, the inflectional comitative
has been giving way to an alternative construction with the postposition
kanssa ‘with’ governing the genitive case. Irrespective of this ongoing change,
the pattern of differentiation has been preserved, because the new
construction is also used exclusively to encode comitative function.) Note that
Finnish and the closely related and immediately neighbouring Estonian opt for
two different solutions: where Finnish employs the pattern of differentiation,
Estonian is characterized by identity.

Reply

Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>