Wednesday, February 15, 2012

More examples of the Triqui thinking construction

In this post and  this post, I talked about the strange syntax of the 'thinking construction'  in Copala Triqui, where some long clause [abc] is followed by rá NP, and the effect is to give NP's expectations, thoughts, hopes, desires about the situation described in [abc].

The following example is another strange one, and like a previous example, it might involve condition D violations if we try to interpret rá NP as the superordinate clause:


Here it is very hard to know if the material within the scope of  includes the 'Herod thought...' part of the sentence.  Maybe not?

I don't think the aspect of the verbs tells us anything, since both completive and potential verbs can be in the scope.

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