Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

DISCUSSION, QUESTION: Verb conjugation by location

From:Karapcik, Mike <karapcm@...>
Date:Monday, May 27, 2002, 18:27
        Hi all,
        Last night, I was reading a book on morphosyntax.
        When the book was discussing inflections, it was mainly discussing
verb conjugation affixes. It listed as examples the usual person, number,
time, continuative, etc.
        Then, it mentioned "location".

        I found this to be very interesting.

        I would imagine that conjugating verbs by location would mainly
involve a separation of "here|not here" and/or "in my presence|not in my
presence". Possibly, it could also include "in|not in your presence", but I
imagine such a construct would be used mainly for future or
subjunctive/imperative tenses. (I think stating "this happened | is
happening in front of you," would elicit a "duh, I was there..." response.)

        And so, the $64 question: Does anyone know of any natural languages
or conlangs in which location is an inherent element in verb conjugations?
How does this work the language?
        I know highly agglutinating languages can do this by affixing
prepositions or adverbs to the verb, but this isn't quite what I had in
mind.
        From what I know about Tagalog (oh, sweet Goddess, someone's
mentioning the "trigger system"...), one of the triggers a verb can be
conjugated to is the location trigger. I suppose this is a valid example
(the verb "triggered" into action because of the location). However, I was
thinking more along the lines of some dichotomy/thrichotomy reference, like
many language differentiate between past/present/future, me/you/him, one
actor / many actors (/dual actors), ongoing/finite, etc. If you will, a
here/away split.

        BTW: the book I was reading is "Describing Morphosyntax : A Guide
for Field Linguists", by Thomas E. Payne, ISBN:0521588057, October 1997.
        It didn't explicitly state that some verbs are conjugated by
location. However, it was discussing verbs. Then it listed verb-like traits
(person, number, etc.), and it threw "location" into the verb-like-stuff
list.


______________________________________
Mike Karapcik   *       Tampa, FL
Network Analyst *       USF campus
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Research Center
ConlangCode: v1.1 CIT !h+ !u cG:M:R:S:G a+ y n30:3
B+++/R:Wic A+ E+ N1 Is/d K ia-:+ p-- s- m o P S----

Replies

Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>
Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...>
Rik Roots <rik@...>