Re: THEORY: third-person imperatives

A little on imperatives in Tokana, for anyone who's interested:

In Tokana, morphological imperatives are used strictly for issuing
commands to the addressee.  There are two imperative suffixes, the
positive suffix "-o" and the negative suffix "-uot":

        lhiano          "come here!"
        lhianuot        "don't come here!"

To form a more polite command or request, the 'defective' verb
"slune" is used, followed by the main verb in the dependent form
(a kind of infinitive):

        slune lhianat   "please come here"

"Slune" is formed from a now-obsolete verb stem meaning "to help",
to which the old imperative/optative suffix "-e" has been added.
In contemporary Tokana, this "-e" suffix has virtually disappeared
from the language, surviving only in a few frozen forms like "slune",
and in expressions like "niokteh telanko" = "may your kindness return
to you" (the Tokana way of saying "thank you").

Expressions which in other languages make use of first person
imperatives are formed with the defective verb "ete", meaning something
like "go ahead, go on" or "let's":

        kim ete nelhat    "let's leave", "why don't we leave"

Finally, a 'third person imperative' of the sort which other people
have discussed ("Have your daughter know...") would be constructed using
the imperative form of the verb "tema", which I characterise as a 'weak
causative' verb:

        temo     ioneuna              napeheko      te  oka
        have-IMP that-she-knows-about your-daughter the tribe
        "make sure your daughter knows about the tribe"

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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