ROUGH DRAFT - SECTION UNDER REVISION

Chapter 7 - Morphosyntactic Constructions

[explain constructions]

Relative Clauses

Mandatory pronoun usage in relative clauses. [I.see.man «ngā» he.in car] = "I see the man who is in the car."

Questions

[types of questions]

Content Questions

Place L you.run? information.requested TOP verbal.question "Where are you running?"

Polar questions

«Xū llō» verbal.question Y/N TOP they meet "Are they meeting?"

Diminutive

The diminutive is used by using lă as a modifier in the NC.

Possession

First modifier position in nominal complex, other adjectives may be placed afterward in order of salience.

Definiteness

Due to the topic-comment structure of an utterance, there is not really any need for definiteness to be marked on the noun. A particular noun would be the topic of the sentence, and would be understood to be definite. But, there are instances in which something would need to be explicitly definite. Since the case classifiers already semantically mean something like "this X" or "that X", we would use the unseen distal proximity to mark the indefinite. This is because something that is indefinite, might physically not be seen, but also may not be known. For example, asking someone to pick an item from a collection of items implies, that you (the speaker) do not know what the interlocutor will select. As such, the actual patient of the sentence would not be able to be seen as such.

Property Constructions

Attributive

Apply predicative adjective in slot 2 of the NC

Predicative

Nominalization

Nominalization is the process of turning a verb into a noun, so that it can serve as a verbal argument. By using this structure, a verb can simply be inserted into the root position in the nominal template. This would produce concepts like "the run" or "the bake", where the latter means something like "the result of having baked something".

Similarity

Using the "agent of" word with the incorporated word (x) of a verbal complex in conjunction with the main verb «pa» takes the sense of "being like a x. This is different from an attributive property construction because it is saying that the verbal argument is similar to, but not the same as the incorporated word.