Re: Another terminology question

'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.

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