Re: Another terminology question

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:
>
>> First off, I've decided to use the term 'construct' after all for the
>> Khafos
>> suffix I asked about last month. Its usage is different from what I'm
>> familiar with from Hebrew and the like, but I've found that the term is
>> used
>> for forms of nouns in certain African languages that occur not only with
>> possessors, but with adjectives, relative clauses, etc. I guess that gives
>> me license. Thanks to those who helped!
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Miapimoquitch: Tcf Pt*p+++12,4(c)v(v/c) W* Mf+++h+++t*a2c*g*n4 Sf++++argh
> La----c++d++600

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