(1) Wǒ búhwèi shwō Jūnggwó hwà.
‘I don’t know how to speak Chinese.’(2) Nǐman kàn shū.
‘You (pl.) read books.’(3) Tāde péngyǒu mài bǐ, búmài jwōdz.
‘His friend sells pencils but does not sell tables.’
Likewise the following examples from Classical Latin (Cicero -63):
And also the data below from Alabama (Davis 1989):
(4) O tempora, o mores!
‘Oh the times, oh the morals!’(5) Mosne maiorum?
‘The customs of our ancestors?’
Taken together, all of these examples make obvious the proper analysis for Indonesian sentences of the sort exemplified by number (8), below (from Slater 1989):
(6) salin roykan ittaasat fayahlo
‘Sally and Roy stopped.’(7) alikchon stiliichabannakha
‘I wanted to become a doctor.’
We might note in passing the existence of languages which use another structural device to encode the same sort of meaning as the structure found in the sentences above; e.g., Martian (Hockett 1955):
(8) lakilaki
‘the boys’
And, of course, English, which exactly follows the Martian pattern:
(9) KAHtah
‘setting of Deimos’
As far as I know, these two distinct structures for the encoding of this semantics are the only ones attested, making the choice of which structure to use an important typological parameter.
(10) Yesterday I went to the beach, but the water was a bit too cold for swimming.
| Mokele Mbembe | Kinshasa Abnormal University |
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Divine Unification Grammar--Ǣlfgār λ. Garcia |
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Exploring Penguin Causatives--Robert F. Scott |
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Linguist of Fortune -- JLSSCNC Vol I, No 1 Contents |