On the trail of accusative in Itunyoso Triqui

Copala Triqui makes very frequent use of man  as an accusative marker.  But does Itunyoso Triqui have an accusative or not?

The Itunyoso Triqui cognate seems to be man'an.  In some uses it seems very much like an accusative:

Mark 1:36

But compare the next sentence in this passage, where man'an does not precede the object pronoun:

Mark 1:37

There is apparently an interesting difference between Itunyoso and Copala in this respect, since in Copala man would be obligatory before the object pronoun.

Compare the same passage in Copala Triqui:

 they said to him 'everyone is looking for you' " Mark 1:37"

another stranded accusative

The following example shows another stranded accusative in a relative clause context.  There is an interesting overlap with the funny syntax of the verb achiin 'need', which has the reverse linking relative to the English verb.  In Triqui, the subject of achiin is the thing which is needed and the person who needs it is the object of the verb, often preceded by accusative man.

Acts 4:34

Stranded accusatives in Copala Triqui in negative fronting

In this previous post and this previous post, I discussed stranded accusative particles in relative clauses.  The following examples show the same stranding process in the negative fronting construction:

Another stranded accusative

In a previous post, I mentioned the possibility of stranding the accusative marker in a relative clause.  Here is another example from a text:

Stranded prepositions in Copala Triqui, continued

In this previous post and this previous post, I talked about stranded material in Copala Triqui.

In the texts, the richest natural source of stranding is found in relative clauses.  Consider the following complicated passage, which has two strandings of rihaan 'to':

Another context for naturally occurring strandings is the contrastive negation construction Nuveé NP V... 'It is not NP that...'

The last clause here is literally 'It is not God who they give that meat to'

More stranded accusatives in Copala Triqui

In an earlier post on this blog, I talked about stranded accusatives in Copala Triqui.  Here is another example from Acts:

This phrase 'the apostles that Jesus named'  is the same as a phrase in the earlier post, but this time in a topicalized position, followed by ro'.

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!

Stranded accusatives in Copala Triqui

A small lesson for me on why it is useful to work through texts -- you encounter things that you would not have known were possible.  Today I found three examples of stranded accusative markers in the Copala Triqui New Testament translation, and this is a construction that I did not know was grammatical!

I think it probably important that all of these appear in relative clause contexts -- ''the apostles that Jesus named ACC", "the ones that Jesus named", and "the ones that you put in jail ACC".

Why has the evil one entered your heart?

At least two things strike me as interesting about this passage.  One is that 'your heart'  doesn't require an obligatory accusative, even though 'you' would.  So possessed body parts occupy an interesting place on the hierarchy of direct object animacy.  The other is the phrase ndaa rihaan.  Ndaa alone means 'up to' and rihaan alone is 'to, for'.  The combination seems to mean 'even up to' or an emphatic version of rihaan.