Tag Archives: holes

Grammar Hole: Indirect Object Modified by Adposition

In a use-your-conlang discussion thread, I wrote tonight:

Ya(m) ko-koronreng yās ragan mararya: […]
LOC(/DAT)F ITER~know-3S.INAN.AGT 1S.PAT line-FOC next
That reminds me of the following line: […]

However, there’s an issue with this sentence as you can probably tell from the brackets: In fact, ragan ‘line, verse’ should be in the dative (raganyam, or yam … ragan here) to mean ‘this reminds me of X’ rather than ‘?this remembers me at X’ as implied by using the locative (raganya or ya … ragan here), but as an adposition, mararya governs the locative. Though it’s one of those kind of adverb-like (?) adpositions that ended up as postpositions, so I might stretch it and still mark its head as dative and have the ad-/postposition be a simple modifier.

Stupid grammar holes you only discover by using the language, but still, yay morphosyntax 🙂 And actually that’s only because I spontaneously decided to use ditransitive ko-koron- ‘to remember’ to mean ‘to remind sb. of sth.’