Re: valency question

Amanda Babcock wrote:

>To me, these two examples of "call" are two separate words, and would be
>separate words in a conlang, unless I wanted it to be a European conlang.
>
>One word is "to call, to summon", with a single object.
>
>The other one would be "to call, to name, to refer to as", with two
objects,
>which you could keep as two objects distinguished, perhaps, by case, or
>you could move one of the objects into a prepositional phrase - or you
could
>noun-incorporate one of them!  "John ugly-called the cat"!
>
>Amanda
>"Mom, he ugly-called me!!!"  heehee
What a wise solution; it just happens to coincide closely with how Kash
deals with the problem.

-yamen 'to call, call out, summon', takes dat., mayamen Shenjiye 'I called
Shenji'

-lepes 'to call= refer to s.t. as...' takes anim.dat., inanim.acc., the
complement is nom. (if a noun):  Mina yalepes Shenjiye Cici 'Mina calls
Shenji "Chichi"; ele yu milepes uku 'we call that plant uku ~that plant is
called uku' ; (ya)trakambo re halepes kashe yonji 'it's impolite to call
someone 'little cock'; (the caus. rundepes means 'to describe': rundepeska
ele uku 'describe(imper.) the uku plant')
Others:
-pilimen 'to consider s.t. as ...., be of the opinion that...':  ne
mipilimen feliyo 'we consider him a fool'; mipilimen re yale angayi ri
latondrelen ya 'we are of the opinion that there is life on that planet.'

-pila-pila 'to consider, ponder, think over' < pila 'to think':  ipila-pila
kracalni 'they considered the problem'

-vele aran, lit. give name, 'to name'  (objs in dat/nom, like _lepes_; the
name given[nom]  follows aran directly):  ivele aran Shenji anayeni ~anayeni
ivele aran Sh. 'they named their child Shenji'

-caus. rumaran 'to name, to appoint':  mirumaran Shenjiye kataren ~ Shenjiye
mirumaran kataren 'we named Shenji(dat.) (as, to be) leader(nom)'

Reply