Friday, February 3, 2012

More uses of the ni'yaj psychological attitude marker in Copala Triqui

The following passages from the Triqui new testament show  interesting additional uses of the ni'yaj morpheme in Copala Triqui. (Described in a previous post.)

The syntax is [Spoke Greeks [ni'yaj they ACC Hebrews about ... ]] and the somewhat idiomatic reading seems to be 'the Greeks complained of the Hebrews that they...'.


This seems to show that a word that is not inherently a psychological attitude verb (like 'speak') can be converted to a psychological attitude verb by using the ni'yaj morpheme.

The following passage is similar, this time with 'think well SUBJ ni'yaj (pron) man NP':


The subject here is the indefinite nii, so this phrase means 'those who people speak well of'.  Note another stranded accusative marker!


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