Re: Derived adpositions (< Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class)

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 1:02 AM, Dana Nutter <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
......
>        mo hap dorav bonu lo.   = I open the door for her.
>
> "Her" here is not the thing being opened but the reason why I
> opened it.
The person for whose good you opened it, or the person you
helped by opening it.  The underlying semantics of the gzb or säb zjeda
equivalent would be something like  "I opened the door helping
her" or "I opened the door to help her" instead of "I opened the
door for the good of her" as in Sasxsek, but any of them would be
rendered in English as "for her" I reckon.

>> At present I have the benefactive preposition derived
>> from a process root for "help".
>
> To me that would more along the lines of instrumental.  S:S: has
> a short preposition "ju" to mark the instrumental.
gzb derives the main instrumental postposition from a root
noun {syj} meaning "using" (which also derives the verb "to use");
säb zjeda apparently doesn't have a lexicon entry for an
instrumental prep. yet but it would be (will be, now) derived
from "shpig", v. "to use".

I've long had another instrumental postp. in gzb for using
body parts and internal faculties (memory, imagination etc.)
in contrast to external tools and materials.  I've recently experimented
with deriving another instrumental postp. for using materials
that get used up during a task as opposed to tools that
typically continue to be usable for future tasks, but I'm not
settled on it yet.  I doubt I'll make a postpositional distinction
between different uses of materials as in "paint a landscape
with watercolors" vs. "wash the stove with Ajax"; the former
would prob. be expressed with a modifier in {-na}, "made of",
rather than an instrumental postposition of any kind.


>> That still leaves me with one transformation out of 20
>> (entity root > preposition) that doesn't seem to make
>> any sense.   Note that some concepts that would be noun
>> roots in other languages are relationship/preposition roots
>> in säb zjeda, -- kinship terms for instance.  Nouns for
>> persons in such relationships to other persons are
>> derived from the root preposition.  All entity roots
>> describe concepts that don't have an inherent
>> relationship to some other entity.  (E.g., "father/mother of"
>> is a preposition root, "person" a noun root.)
>> I guess I could kludge in something like " [obj of prep] is
>> treated like/considered as [entity] by
>> [head of prep phrase]", just to avoid having a
>> gap in the system, but I don't like it.
>
> Or a relative pronoun "X *who* is the father of Y ..."
But would that work with entity roots that don't describe
a relationship?  And any concept that does involve
a relationship (like "father") will be lexicalized as a
relationship/preposition root in säb zjeda.

Maybe the entity > preposition typecast (to use
the term deprecated by Alex, though I don't know of
a better term for it yet) means something like
"[object of preposition] is an [entity] in some unspecified
genitive-like relationship to the head of the prep.
phrase".   So xejom'e (cat-PREP) would mean
something like "the pet cat of", and so forth.
But more probably "pet", if it's lexicalized as a
word rather than a phrase, would be a relationship
root; a pet, unlike animals in general, is an animal
in a certain relationship to a specific human,
much as a father, unlike men in general, is a man
in a specific relationship to his child or children
and their mother.

> I do have another adposition "lu" which roughtly means "called
> by" to equate a common noun to a specific proper noun.  If I say
> "kat iu mo lu vladimir ..." it would be like "My cat, Vladimir
> ..."
gzb has an "also known as" conjunction that links two
noun phrases describing the same entity, or two clauses
that describe the same situation from different perspectives.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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