Re: Noli-me-tangere

Ray Brown wrote:

>There are other languages also which don't have negative imperatives, so to
>speak, by some other way of forming prohibitions.
>
>How do other conlangers deal with this.  Is it just the word for "not" +
>the imperative, or are there some more interesting constructions among our
>conlangs?
A linguistics professor of mine once suggested to me the following as a
linguistic universal:

(1) If a language has one or more morphologically distinct imperative
forms, it will use these solely for positive imperatives, and will use
a different morphological form (typically the indicative) for negative
imperatives.

(2) If a language constructs imperatives using some already existing
form of the verb (e.g. the second person indicative, as in French and
German), then the negative imperative may be formed simply by adding
the normal negation to the positive imperative.

I don't know if this universal holds up cross-linguistically, but there
are certainly a lot of natlangs which obey it.  Malagasy is one.  In
Malagasy you add a special suffix "-a" or "-o" (sometimes "-y") to form
the imperative.  However, negative imperatives are formed using the
negative imperative particle "aza" (cf. "tsy", the normal marker of
negation) followed
by the indicative form of the verb:

        misotro         "drinks" (indic)
        tsy misotro     "doesn't drink" (neg indic)

        misotroa        "drink!" (imp)
        aza misotro     "don't drink!" (neg imp)
                                (NOT *"aza misotroa")

Other languages which have a special morphological form for the positive
imperative have a distinct morphological form for the negative imperative.
This is the strategy I adopted for my conlang Tokana:

        sepa            "drinks" (indic)
        (tu) sepoti     "doesn't drink"  (neg indic)

        sepo            "drink!" (imp)
        sepuot          "don't drink!" (neg imp)

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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