Re: Preventatives

Dan Sulani wrote at 2004-06-08 11:02:41 (+0200)
 >     Causation is such a basic fact of life, that many natlangs
 > (most? all?) have a grammatically encoded way to express it.
 > Lately it has occurred to me that, while _prevention_ can also be
 > very important, I can't think of any natlang that has a
 > grammatically marked "preventative". Can anybody think of any?  Do
 > any of your conlangs have such a thing?


I'm pretty sure that my conlang LC-01 has a preventative, or something
very like one.  LC-01 morphology is complex, and development is on
hold until I know more phonology (among other things).  But I know
there is a suffix-complex on verbs which deals with all kinds of
causative relations* (mandatory to add an agentive argument to a verb)
and I'm sure a preventative construction is possible, although whether
there's a single preventative morpheme, or whether a negative is used
together with a certain class of causative, is still hazy.  Aspect
enters into it too, of course.


* Perhaps a more precise description would be "force dynamics", as
  on this page I read recently:
  http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/Talmy.html