She shows forth beauty

OK, I haven't posted any daily tidbits for my conlang for a few days
now... so here's another one. Today's tidbit will talk about stative
sentences.

I've posted a lot about verbal sentences in various threads already, but
not much on stative sentences at all, so an explanation is in order:
verbal sentences are used when there's a change in state -- i.e.,
something is actively happening. When a static situation is being
described, stative sentences are used. Stative sentences express a static
relationship between nouns; thus stative sentences lack verbs. These
static relationships are expressed by the cases of the nouns in the
stative sentence.

Here's an example of a stative sentence: (cover story :-P)
        biz3t30'   d3m3'l.
        woman(org) beauty(cvy)
        "The woman is beautiful." Literally, "the woman shows forth beauty".

The combination of the originative case with the conveyant case expresses
a source-expression relationship: the woman shows forth the attribute of
beauty.

Compare this with the verbal sentence where somebody sees the woman's
beauty:
        biz3t30'   fww't3    d3m3'l      pii'z3du.
        woman(org) see(verb) beauty(cvy) man(rcp)
        "The man sees the woman's beauty", or, "the man sees that the
        woman is beautiful."

Here, the verb "fww't3" indicates that an event has occurred -- the beauty
of the woman has been seen by the man. Notice that "beauty" is in the
conveyant case, because it is that which is conveyed to the man's sight;
and the woman is in the originative because she is the source of the
conveyed beauty.

Not all attributes are expressed using the originative-conveyant
combination, however. Here's another attributive stative sentence:
        th0'ta3     pii'z3du.
        height(cvy) man(rcp)
        "The man is tall." Literally, "There is height to the man", or,
        "The man possesses height."

This construct is known as the possessive stative. The conculture regards
the thing possessed as being focused towards its possessor; hence, the
possessee is in the conveyant case, and the possessor in the receptive.
(Another way to think of this is that the possessor is the recipient of
the possessee during some past acquisition.)

Height is a spatial attribute; all spatial attributes are expressed by the
possessive stative (conveyant + receptive). "Expressive" attributes such
as beauty, wisdom, etc., are expressed by the previous construct, the
expressive stative (originative + conveyant).

Yet other attributes are expressed by other noun case combinations; but
since this post is getting quite long, I'll save that for next time. :-P

As usual, comments, criticisms, suggestions, fan-mail (ahem), flames, are
welcome.


T