Re: going without "without"

Sorry, Matt, this probably won't help you any, but this is a very
non-boring aspect of conlanging, and I got carried away :-)

On Mon, 16 Aug 1999, Matt Pearson wrote:

> (Note that the instrumental is also used to indicate concepts like
> "through", and "via".  In general, it is used to indicate objects
> and locations which act as intermediaries between the actor and
> the goal/patient in an action.  E.g., the knife acts as an
> intermediary between John and the bread by actually performing
> the act of cutting, as a result of John's manipulating it.)
>
> The comitative case (marked by the suffix "-a" or "-ia" on the
> noun) is used to indicate a participant who is accompanying
> another participant in an action, or an instrument which is
> aiding in the performance of an action.  For example:
>
>   Ma    puniei            pule        inak    Tsiona
>   I.Erg travelled-the.Dat village-Dat the.Com John-Com
>   "I travelled to the village with John"
>
>   Na      luiha     eta  ypena
>   the.Erg old.woman walk stick-Com
>   "The old woman walks with a stick"
It's clear enough up to the example with John, but why does the old
woman walking with a stick use the comitative and not the
instrumental? Isn't the stick acting as an intermediary between the
woman and her walking? I admit that it's not the stick that does the
actual walking, but she's using it as a tool, not only for company.

In Valdyan:

  lyase ruve       gonyen    barat
  woman old.person stick-INS walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks with a stick"

If this was expressed with the equivalent of the comitative:

? lyase ruve       az            gonyen    barat
  woman old.person together-with stick-DAT walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks in the company of a stick"

it seems like the old woman and the stick are walking side by side,
as if they were sisters.

> All well and good.  The problem is that I now no longer
> have a good way to express "without" in Tokana.  Once I'd
> eliminated the preposition "kun" = "with", I had to get rid
> of the derived form "tukun" = "without" as well, for the
> sake of symmetry.  So now I'm stuck as to what to do instead.
I suppose that "tukun" literally means "not-with" (or is that my
exposure to Denden where tu- is one variant of the weak negation?),
so if you want "without" to be derived from "with" like in your
earlier version, you can negate the instrumental or the comitative
instead of the preposition.

> Adding a new case form (the "privative" case?) seems a little
> drastic.  I pride myself on the fact that all of the existing
> cases in Tokana (there are 6 of them now) are highly
> polysemous, each combining various different grammatical
> functions in a single form.
Do you have an ablative, and could it carry this extra meaning, as
"taken-away-from"?

> A second option would be to express "without" by negating
> the noun phrase in the comitative case, thusly:
>
>   Na      luiha     tun ypena     ietoti
>   the.Erg old.woman Neg stick-Com walk-Neg
>   "The woman doesn't walk with a stick"
>   "It's not with a stick that the woman walks"
>
> However, this seems to convey the wrong meaning: The sentence
> seems to imply that the woman walks with SOMETHING, but that
> this something happens not to be a stick.  (My instinct is that
> "without" means something slightly different from "with" + "not",
> or "not" + "with"...  Is that right?)
I'll try this in Valdyan again:

  ni  gonyen    lyase ruve       na  barat
  NEG stick-INS woman old.person NEG walk-3s-PRS
  "It is not with a stick that the old woman walks"

Yes, this seems to imply that she walks, for instance, with the
branch of a tree or the back of a chair. Perhaps a less marked word
order would help:

  lyase ruve       ni  gonyen    na  barat
  woman old.person NEG stick-INS NEG walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman doesn't walk with a STICK"

It doesn't help much; the nominal negation _ni_ tends to slightly
mark whatever it negates, and we still want to ask "then what does
she walk with?". Let's try it without:

  lyase ruve       gonyen    na  barat
  woman old.person stick-INS NEG walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman doesn't WALK with a stick"

The Valdyan voice in the back of my head now asks "but what does she
do with the stick then, beat the dog?" We know that she walks; let's
make her walk but not use the stick:

  lyase ruve       ni  gonyen    barat
  woman old.person NEG stick-INS walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks, not with a stick"

Better; much better, even though it goes against the school-grammar
rule that the verb should always be negated if anything else in the
sentence is. It does still imply that she uses something else to walk
with, though. It seems that we need "without" after all.

> How do
> people express "without" in their conlangs?
Valdyan has _liz_, a postposition derived from a conjunction - it
never was a preposition like _az_ (and most other postpositions) used
to be (note: this is not an earlier stage in my work on Valdyan, but
an assumed earlier stage of the language in its historical context).
It still means "except when" or "unless" as well, in the proper
context.

Let's try it:

  lyase ruve       gonyin    liz     barat
  woman old.person stick-ABL without walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks without a stick"

This can *never* mean "not accompanied by a stick"; the sentence
doesn't tell whether or not the woman has a stick with her, only that
she isn't using one to walk. We can't say

* lyase ruve       parnei     liz     barat
  woman old.person sister-ABL without walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks without her sister"

because that would mean that the old woman uses her sister as a tool
(or rather, doesn't do it, but negating something implies that the
positive also exists). We have to say

  lyase ruve       parnen     niez           barat
  woman old.person sister-DAT NEG.along-with walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman walks unaccompanied by her sister"

Just for completeness' sake, if we negate the verb in this sentence
it does change the meaning (that is, _niez_ doesn't count as a
negation that requires a negated verb; it's more like the comitative
equivalent of instrumental _liz_):

  lyase ruve       parnen     niez           na  barat
  woman old.person sister-DAT NEG.along-with NEG walk-3s-PRS
  "The old woman doesn't walk unaccompanied by her sister"

implying that she doesn't (want to) take a walk if her sister doesn't
come along.

I think an earlier stage of Valdyan may have had a construction in
which _liz_ was used as a conjunction: "the old woman walks, the
stick excepted", or "the stick away-from-her".

   Irina


            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
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