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Re: Uto-Aztecan [was: What is an IE language]

From:Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
Date:Monday, December 30, 2002, 22:38
At 9:27 AM +0100 12/21/02, Mangiat wrote:
>Dirk wrote: > >> * absolutive suffixes: The Uto-Aztecan absolutive is not a case suffix; it >is a suffix (or more typically a group of suffixes) which appears on a noun >in citation form but may drop when a noun is subjected to various >morphological processes, such as affixation (possession, postpositions), >compounding, or reduplication. (The characteristic -tl of Nahuatl is an >absolutive with allomorphs -tli and -lli.) > >Mh... now I understand why the incorporation of _nacatl_ "meat" yields >_-naca-_. My textbook gives two Nahuatl sample sentences (I hope to remember >them correctly; the book is offhand) to show how incorporating languages >work: "nicqua in nacatl" (I eat meat) and "ninacaqua" (lit.: I meat-eat). No >interlinear was given, and I supposed -tl was a morph conveying some case >mark (accusative or absolutive, but I had no idea about UA syntactic >structures). I tried to parse the two sentences and this is what I got: > >nic-qua in nacatl >1s-eat * meat > >(where * is some sort of object mark or a determiner, perhaps) and: > >ni-naca-qua >1s-meat-eat > >Makes sense?
Yup. That's how I'd parse those sentences, with one change: the c- in the first sentence is the third person singular object prefix: ni- c- qua in naca -tl 1s.SUBJ- 3s.OBJ- eat DET meat -ABS You'll notice that this prefix isn't present in the incorporated form, presumably because incorporation in Nahuatl derives an intransitive verb. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu "It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of fact." - Stephen Anderson