Thursday, September 6, 2012

Puzzling verb in Copala Triqui

It puzzles me that the verb achríj rá seems to mean both 'realize' and 'suspect'.  These have different properties of factivity in English -- the complement of 'realize' must be a fact, while the complement of 'suspect' does not have to be.  The same seems to be true for Spanish darse cuenta and sospechar.

We explained this to our speaker, who understands the difference between the English and Spanish, but still thinks the Triqui might mean both.  It's interesting that the Triqui lexicon divides up the semantic space of cognition differently that English.

Here's our current (imperfect!) entry for achríj rá:


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