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

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