THEORY: Serial Verb Constructions With "Kill" (was: THEORY: "Finite Verbs" vs "Non-Finite Verbs" in Languages with Poly-Personal Agreement)

On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:13:02 +0200, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-
conlang@...> wrote:
[snip]
>> Ooh!  I wanna see!  I wanna see!
>
>Okay. Taruven has a weird form of pro-drop, to start with: a dropped
>subject means the subject is 1st person, a dropped object means the
>object is 3rd person, a dropped indirect object means the indirect
>object is 3rd person *animate*.
>
>It also has serial verb constructions:
>
>jehan Seva kirja kru ilisiaT
>
>This is, obviously :), an SVC: Jehan go cut kill Ilisi.
>S is [S], T is [T], aT marks objects
I find it interesting that your first example of a serial verb
construction uses a verb meaning "kill" as part of the series.

Is "Jehan" the Taruven equivalent of "Jack", by any chance?

>Seva kiri kru ilisiaT
>
>This is, obviosly, also an SVC: I/we go cut kill Ilisi.
>
>As is this:
>
>Seva kiri kru = I go cut kill someone/something
>
>All very nice for newspaper headlines.
And what's the difference, if any, between the Taruven for "cut" and the
Taruven for "rip"?

>If you tell a story and the events happen consequtively and you need to
>add detail you can't use an SVC, so you clause chain instead:
>
>jehan Seva saies, lekiri ilisiaT ao lekru iaT
>
>Jehan go to.river, same.subject-cut Ilisi and.then same.subject-kill
him/her.
>
>(In this particular example the clause-chaining implies that it took
>some time between each act since if not an SVC would have been
>sufficient.)
There are five possible relation ships between a referent (or time or
location) of a Marked clause and a referent (or time or location) of a
Reference clause:

= (Exact, coextensive identity)
< (marked referent properly contained within Reference referent)
> (marked referent properly contains Reference referent)
^ overlap (neither referent lies within the other but they have part(s) in
common)
| disjunction (the two referents are completely disjoint, having no parts
in common).

When we're talking about Same/Different Subjects and/or Same/Different
Objects, AFAIK no natlang distinguishes between ^ and |.

But it would be natural to make such a distinction in the Same/Different
Location marking.

(BTW most switch-reference natlangs either use the same mark for all of <
and > and ^ and |, different from =; or use the same mark for all of = and
< and >, different from ^ and | which are marked the same as each other.
But some mark < different from >.)

When we're talking about Same/Different Time, two other possibilities can
come up; if one clause ends before another begins, (so they are disjoint
|), are they consecutive/contiguous or not?  Also, if they overlap in time
wihtout either being contained within the other (the ^ relationship),
which of them begins before the other begins and ends before the other
ends?

>Now this...
>
>jehan Seva saies, kiri ilisiaT ao kru iaT
>
>means "Jehan go to.river, I/we cut Ilisi and.then I/we kill him/her"
>
>This is ambiguous btw: did I/we kill Ilisi or Jehan? It might be that
>there is also a marker for same object but I haven't discovered one so
>far.
I assume you mean "I haven't discovered a 'SameObject vs DifferentObject'
morphology in Taruven so far."
Because there is at least one in at least one natlang.

>Furthermore, all words capable of acting as transitives may incorporate
>an object. Sometime these combinations fossilize, like riTann, meaning
>"give name", ergo baptize.
>
>Type I object-incorporation is basically: the object is incorporated,
>turning the verb into an intransitive modified by the former object:
>
>kirja veigaT "I cut down a/the tree(s)"
>\-> kirjaveige "I am tree-cutting"
>
>If theory is to be believed, to have type IV one needs to also have type
>II and III, but I have no good examples.
Remind me, please, what the differences are between Types I, II, III, and
IV of object-incorporation?

Thanks.

>On to type IV:
>
>kirja SakraaT "I cut down cherry-trees"
>\-> kirjaveige SakraaT "I am tree-cutting cherry-trees"
>
>Another, similar phenomenon:
>kirja kair veigevunaT "I cut down four small trees"
>\-> kirjaveige kairvunaT "I tree-cut four small ones(trees)"
>
>So, the incorporated object remains an object and is modified by
>anything else that is marked with the object-marker.
>
>Yet another example:
>
>jehan kirjaveige IlisiaT "Jehan cut down Ilisi as he/she would fell a
tree"
>
>Back to the very lexicalized incorporations: with riTann, the name
>itself would be marked as an object:
>
>yriTannra xaiaT "they named him 'Pain'/he was named 'Pain'"
>
>What's really going on is that the "object" is still accessible and is
>modified attributively just like the case with "kirjaveige" above.
>
>Sorry for the bloody examples,
It just seems natural to use "cut kill" as a serial verb construction,
especially if your subject is named Jack.  I suppose if he were named
Maxwell, you'd use a "hit kill" SVC.

>I don't have that many transitive verbs
>to demonstrate with yet :)
>
>
>t., who knows that the last sentence can be interpreted at least two ways
Thanks.

-----
Eldin

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