Subordinating Verbs: A Small Blast from the Past

Grammar Musings, , , , ,

I was recently thinking about this with regards to writing my New and Improved (tee-em) grammar of Ayeri and my previous post on subordinating verbs. I saw subordinating verbs as posing the problem of putting too much stuff in the constituent that holds the verb. As a solution, I described moving the complement of the main verb into a finite complement clause if it’s more than intransitive. However, when I did some analysis of verbs yesterday to maybe shed some light on the alternation between -isa and -isu in deverbal adjectives, I came across the following example sentence in the entry for pinya ‘ask’, entered October 24, 2008:

  1. [gloss]Sa pinyayāng ye rimayam silvenoley.
    Sa pinya=yāng ye rima-yam silveno-ley
    PT ask=3SG.M.A 3SG.F.TOP close-PTCP window-P.INAN[/gloss]
    ‘Her he asks to close the window.’

Material from 2008 is not quite fresh anymore, but going through my example texts, I also found the following sentence fragment in the 2010/11 Conlang Holiday Card Exchange (interlinear glossing updated to current standards):

  1. [gloss]nārya le tavisayang takan incam dagangyeley
    nārya le tavisa=yang takan-Ø int-yam dangang-ye-ley
    but PT.INAN receive=1S.A chance-TOP buy-PTCP card-PL-P.INAN[/gloss]
    ‘but I got the chance to buy cards’

In both cases, the subordinating verb is transitive: (1) ‘he asks her’, (2) ‘I got the chance’; pinya- ‘ask’ in (1) is a raising an object-control verb (the logical subject of the subordinate verb is the object of the verb in the matrix clause), while int- ‘buy’ in (2) should simply be an infinite clausal complement. However, in both cases we do neither get the complement awkwardly placed in the middle, nor are the sentences rephrased so as to result in a finite complement clause or a nominalized complement to avoid the infinite verb form:

    1. ?? [gloss]Sa pinyayāng rimayam silvenoley ye.
      Sa pinya=yāng rima-yam silveno-ley ye
      PT ask=3SG.M.A close-PTCP window-P.INAN 3SG.F.TOP[/gloss]
      ‘Her he asks to close the window.’
    2. [gloss]Pinyayāng, ang rimaye silvenoley.
      pinya=yāng, ang rima=ye.Ø silveno-ley
      ask=3SG.M.A, AT close=3SG.F.TOP window-P.INAN[/gloss]
      ‘He asks that she closes the window.’

    1. [gloss]nārya le tavisayang takan intanena dagangyena
      nārya le tavisa=yang takan-Ø intan-ena dangang-ye-na
      but PT.INAN receive=1S.A chance-TOP purchase-GEN card-PL-GEN[/gloss]
      ‘but I got the chance of a purchase of cards’
    2. [gloss]nārya le tavisayang takan, ang incay dagangyeley
      nārya le tavisa=yang takan-Ø, ang int=ay.Ø dangang-ye-ley
      but PT.INAN receive=1S.A chance-TOP, AT buy=1SG.TOP card-PL-P.INAN[/gloss]
      ‘but I got the chance that I buy cards’

Both constructions, (1) and (2) are not widely attested in my materials, and the new grammar doc as it currently is does not rule out cases like (2), insofar I only need to make up my mind about constructions like in (1): continue allowing them as a variant, declare them ungrammatical, or simply ignore them? In the first case I might be required to keep a VP or a functional equivalent of it, after all, since there would be a post-subject position associated with verbs, then. In any case, raising and control should be interesting topics to come to terms with in my conlang.