Re: Another terminology question

Nonassertive sounds good. Thanks, And.

Josh


on 5/30/08 3:02 PM, And Rosta at and.rosta@GMAIL.COM wrote:

> 'Nonassertive' is used in anglistics to cover "Negative and/or Interrogative".
> In English it covers the contexts where NPIs (negative polarity items), such
> as "ever" and "any" and "at all", (mainly) occur, the contexts where auxiliary
> NEED and DARE occur, the contexts in which KNOW with a bare infinitive
> complement occurs, and so forth. In sum, grammatical nonassertivity is a very
> important notion for English grammar.
>
> --And.
>
> JR, On 30/05/2008 10:46:
>> on 5/30/08 5:43 AM, Dirk Elzinga at dirk.elzinga@GMAIL.COM wrote:
>>
>>> 'Irrealis' would work.
>>
>> I thought of this, but as discussed recently here, the term has some
>> drawbacks. It's very general and is used in very different ways, many of
>> which have little in common with what I have here. And David Crystal's
>> definition, which David Peterson cited, precludes it: "...the proposition is
>> weakly asserted to be true, but the speaker is not ready to support the
>> assertion ..." But I'll use this if nothing better turns up.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Josh
>>
>>> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 6:04 PM, JR <fuscian@...> wrote:
>>>> I have another question. Khafos uses the same marker (an infix, sometimes
>>>> in
>>>> combination with a prefix too*; and the infix varies in the examples below
>>>> because it contains a copy of the previous vowel) to mark words as being
>>>> negative, or as being questioned, whether they're wh- words or anything
>>>> else. Ex:
>>>>
>>>> ha-ia-lo-m
>>>> leave1-X-leave2-2
>>>> 'You're not leaving.'
>>>>
>>>> ha-ia-lo-m? (with rising intonation)
>>>> leave1-X-leave2-2
>>>> 'Are you leaving?'
>>>> (This is not the equivalent of 'you're not leaving?" It's the unmarked way
>>>> to ask the question; 'halom?' would only be used as an echo question.)
>>>>
>>>> p-a-ia-lllo       halo-n-sh
>>>> X-idiot1-X-idiot2 leave-Sub-3
>>>> 'It's not the idiot who's leaving.'
>>>>
>>>> p-a-ia-lllo       halo-n-sh?
>>>> X-idiot1-X-idiot2 leave-Sub-3
>>>> 'Is the *idiot* leaving?'
>>>>
>>>> gy-iy halo-n-sh?
>>>> who-X leave-Sub-3
>>>> 'Who's leaving?'
>>>>
>>>> Is there one term I can use that covers both the interrogative and
>>>> negate-ive properties of this marker?
>>>>
>>>> Josh
>>>>
>>>> * Logically there could be a separate term for this combination, as there
>>>> is
>>>> for prefix + suffix (=circumfix), but I won't even ask.