'Goody goody' in Trique

One of my favorite lexical entries in a while is the difficult to translate interjection arsínj, said when a bad person, or a person who has rejected your good advice, gets into trouble.  The closest we could come up with in English was 'Goody! Goody!'

Here is an English expression of the same sentiment.

Orange oil in darkness — A poetic view of two ways of doing linguistics

Orange oil in darkness

The useful part
of things is elegance --
in mathematics, bridges.

Even in hedges
of ripe persimmons
or mandarin oranges,

elegance solves
for the minimum possible
then dissolves.

The art is what's extra:
a fragrance penciled in,
or long division's inescapable reminder.

Not quite unplanned for,
more the unexpected, impractical gift.
Not the figures traced

in the bridge's stanchions,
but the small
and lovely sounds they make in the wind.

Who drew that in?
Who could have?
...

-- Jane Hirshfield "The Lives of the Heart"

This poem sums up about as well as anything the aesthetic that I've come to after three decades in linguistics.   I am profoundly moved by the elegance of language, and it is something that I try to convey to my students and in my writing.  But I'm also delighted by the quirky art of language -- the delicate curlicues, impractical extravagances, and intensely detailed categorizations of the world.   I seem to only be happy in linguistics when I'm able to be both moved and delighted!

Clarification on older practical orthography for tone in Copala Triqui

In an earlier post, I was uncertain about the right interpretation of the tone orthography used in Hollenbach's (1977) versions of the Sun and Moon myth.  Barbara Hollenbach was kind enough to clarify for me that in this previous version of the practical orthography " The three lower patterns (1, 2, 13) were written with a single macron on the final vowel."

So cacaā could represent /kakaa¹, kakaa², kakaa¹³/.  The particular line that worried me in the previous post contained the word <cacaā>.  In the current orthographic practice, macron is replaced with underscore, so that would translate to cacaa̱ , and <aa̱> = /aa³¹/.  However, in the orthography of the 1977 texts, cacaā had a different interpretation, and in this text, the right interpretation is /kakaa²/.

Another way in which it is easy to get confused by the 1977 texts is that 31 tone is not indicated in any special way in that orthography.  (It is marked by aa̱ in the current practice, as just mentioned.)

The differences can (I think be summed up this way) for long vowels:

Tone     Current Orthog    Previous Orthog (1977)

3                   aa                          aa
32                 aa                          aa
31                 aa̱                          aa
4                   aá                          aá
5                   áá                          aá
1                   a̱a̱                          aā
2                   a̱a̱                          aā
13                 a̱a                          aā

The previous orthography thus makes only three distinctions — <a, ā, á> — while the current orthography makes six <aa, aa̱, a̱a, a̱a̱, aá, áá> for long vowels.

This does create a practical problem for entering in the 1977 texts in the FLEx database — at one level, it seems desirable to preserve the original orthography of these texts.  On the other hand, it is strongly at variance with the majority of the material, which uses the more recent orthography.   I can't necessarily predict the modern orthography of the word from the older orthography without looking it up in the dictionary and understanding the morphology, so there is no way to do it automatically.

More on causative in Copala Triqui

I wrote a bit about the odd causative construction in Copala Triqui in this post.  To recap, the normal syntax is

[VSO] cause SUBJ.

In the examples cited there, the aspect of the verb 'make' ('yaj) seems to match the aspect of the verb in the complement.  The following example -- if I am interpreting it correctly, seems to show a failure of aspect-matching:

One slight uncertainty -- this text comes from Hollenbach's (1977) version of these texts, published in Tlalocan.  The orthography uses a macron over the vowel to represent low register tone, rather than a line under the vowel.  So the original form of the word that I've retranscribed as cacaa̱ was written cacaā.  

In the usual form of the practical orthography for Triqui tone, cacaa̱ represents only cacaa³¹,  while
cacaa is either cacaa³ or cacaa³².  So as the text is written, it would normally correspond to c-acaa³¹. However, the word for 'burn' in Triqui is acaa³² (practical orthography acaa) and its potential is c-acaa² (c-aca̱a̱).

I'm tentatively guessing that this represents an earlier version of the practical orthography where perhaps both 31 and 32 tones were written vv̱…

If my interpretation is correct, then the two instances of the verb 'burn' are completive, while 'will make' qui'ya̱j is potential.

Update  11/23/2012

Barbara Hollenbach has kindly clarified for me by email the way the older practical orthography for tone worked.  I've tried to summarize my understanding in this post.  That means that my analysis in the earlier post is incorrect in identifying the instances of the verb <cacaā> as cacaa³².  Instead, it is an older way of writing c-acaa², which is the potential aspect form of 'burn'.  Thus the aspect of make (potential)' does match the aspect of the potential, and I don't have a counterexample to the tentative generalization that the two always match.  (A counterexample might still be found, but this doesn't turn out to be a valid counterexample.)

The new analysis of this passage is shown below:

Then he ordered the opossum

I think the syntax of the following line in a Triqui folktale is pretty interesting for its lack of anything like PRO or Condition B effects:

Literally, 'He ordered the opossum (that) it will lower it in the water'.  The verb tanij is in the potential aspect, as is normal for the complement of a verb like 'order'.  But nothing seems to signal the coreference between the main clause object 'opossum' and the two pronouns coreferent to it in the embedded clause.

Phrase-book material in a lexicon

Native speakers or learners of a language often find it useful to have a set of common phrases in the language.  But do these go in the dictionary?

It seems awkward to have entries like the following:

But an alternative is to use the Publications field in FLEx to define a separate Phrasebook.  You configure this via Lists | Publications and add a new Publication called Phrasebook. The default publication is Main Dictionary, so if you haven't changed anything, that is where all the entries will appear.

The default seems to be that all entries are in all publications.   I used the Bulk Edit commands to remove Phrasebook from the Publication lists of all the entry, then went back in and selected the entries I wanted for the Phrasebook.

For this entry, this means adjusting the Publications field to say only Phrasebook and not Main Dictionary.  After changing the field, it now looks like this:

In the lexicon pane, we can pick which dictionary to display.  The default will be the main dictionary:

From the pull-down arrow next to the words Main Dictionary Entries, we can also select other publications, such as the Phrasebook.  The following screen shows a partially populated Phrasebook:

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"

inflected light verb in the psych complement construction

This terrific example from Copala Triqui shows that the light verb ne'en which appears before certain psych complements can even inflect for aspect:

Philemon 1:17

In this example, we get two sequences of uun rá...ne'en 'love, regard ... psych complement'.  The first instance is in the completive, so ne'en is also completive.  But the second instance is guun rá, the potential aspect, so the verb ne'en is in its potential aspect form (quene'en) as well.

Psych complements with ne'e(n) again

Another example of the verb ne'e(n) serving as a marker of a psych complement, from 2 Corinthians 6:11-13

2 Cor 6:13

The literal translation is something like "Thus as one loves one's child, that is how I love you, and that is why I say to you that as we have done to you, you should do also to us, and have confidence in us."

Some interesting points to note -- the typical syntax after the psych complement marker is ne'e(n) SUBJ man OBJ.   The accusative marker is typical because the NP towards which one has an attitude is typically a specific human, and specific human objects are very likely have overt accusative.  But notice that in this passage, the object is a generic 'one's child', and is not preceded by the accusative.

Also interesting that uun rá 'love' triggers the psych complement marker, but nucuaj rá 'have confidence in' doesn't, at least in this passage.

Here is another passage that uses both ne'e(n) and ni'yaj.  I am not sure if there is some difference implied by the choice of psych complement introducer:

Col 1:2

Update on Copala Triqui pysch verbs with ne'e as light verb

We spent some time today working with our Triqui speaker on the psych verbs that use ni'yaj as a light verb to introduce a complement.  (Discussed here, here, here, here, and here).

I was delighted to find out that while our speaker accepts and uses ni'yaj, he more frequently suggests ne'e  as the marker of psych complement.  The connection is that the other sense of ni'yaj is 'look at; mirar', while ne'e also means 'see; ver'.  Thus two different verbs of perception are used to introduce the psych complement.

Here's an example in the entry for the verb 'be jealous':

And here is the entry for one of the verbs that means 'like':

A particularly interesting example is 'I like the music very much'.  This shows the degree to which ne'e  is grammaticized here, since one does not literally see the music.

Here is an example from the New Testament with ne'e(n):

Hapax legomenon in Copala Triqui

The word quita'a' which appears in this verse (Romans 14:14) is the only instance of this word in the New Testament, and I am not clear what it is supposed to mean.

Here is the PDF of the relevant passage in Romans:

It seems as if it might be a form of the verb ta'aa 'take, catch', but what causes the final glottal stop to appear?

Wrong font in FLEx

I thought I would share a silly little trick I stumbled upon recently.

If you cut and paste examples from some other document (e.g. Word) into a FLEx  example field, often the font or style looks weird.

 I believe that FLEx is trying to retain the font from the other document.

You can select the example, go to the toolbar and select the correct style (usually Default Paragraph).

But a quick and easy way to accomplish the same thing is to select the example, cut it, and then paste it back.  After the text is pasted in, it goes into the correct font.

Now it looks like this:

Gentiles = people apart

I worked out today that the phrase yuvii yaníj , literally 'people who are apart' is the phrase which translates 'Gentile' or 'Greek' in the Copala Triqui translation of the New Testament, as in the following passage:

Yuvii  is the ordinary word for 'people', and yaníj means 'apart, separated'.  So the combination 'people apart' or 'separated people' means 'Gentile'.

Here is an example of yaníj used in its more usual way to mean 'apart':

More on affirmative vaa in Triqui

In a previous entry here, I talked about the myserious vaa ne that comes at the end of many lines in our texts.

I noted that Barbara Hollenbach in her sketch of Copala Triqui writes

 'The verbs vaa32 'to exist' and uun1 'to become' often take a sentence of any type as a subject complement with no complementizer.  These verbs serve to affirm the truth of the complement sentence, and they can follow the complement as well as precede it'. 

This is an important clue to understanding syntax of such sentences.  The final vaa takes the preceding material as a subject complement.

However as I look at more examples, it is not clear that it correct to say that they affirm the truth of the preceding complement.  For some cases where the speaker is talking about future events, the vaa seems to express a hope that that the statement will be true.

Consider the following examples:

In this example, vaa comes after the clause 'and hopefully will live for three thousand years in this world.'  But it doesn't seem right to say that the speaker is affirming the truth of a hope.

Another example of the same thing:

Copala Triqui asa' 'when'

The Triqui complementizer asa' is rather unusual in its syntax.  It means 'when' for future events.  However, it is not followed by a verb in the potential aspect — the usual way to show future in Triqui.

Instead it is usually followed by the completive aspect, as in the following two examples:

This example seems to say literally  'I will speak to you when I arrived…'

The next example is also interesting:

In this example, look at the two instances of the verb 'yaj 'make, do'.  Both refer to future events, and the first instance has the regular morphology of potential aspect — qui'yaj.  The second instance follows asa', so it instead appears in the completive form qui'yaj.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the inversion of normal aspect morphology after the negative particle, when semantic future shows up with completive morphology.  However, after the negative, we also get the reverse — semantic past shows up with potential morphology.  The shift after asa' happens in only one direction.

Possibly we want to think of certain morphemes like asa' as having floating autosegmental material that suppresses the normal low register for the following verb?

Pop quiz on Dari spelling

To make sure that the students are learning the orthography, I'm giving them some pop quizzes like the following, where the task is to match spelling and phonetics.

Imageability, concreteness, and metaphor identification

This image shows a nice example of our metaphor identification procedure.  Each word in  a paragraph is graphed for its imageability and concreteness score, and
a.) highly imageable words
b.) that do not have a close semantic relationship to the topic of the paragraph
are likely to be metaphors.

The core of the imageability and concreteness rankings comes from psycholinguistic research, and we've expanded this core enormously by using WordNet sister terms to approximate these scores for words not contained in the original database.

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:

Working a bit with the Advanced Search feature at Dadegan today.  I'm trying to make sure I understand all the menu options.

This search looks for the verb خوردن ' eat'  with غذا 'food' as its object.

Persian Dependency analyses

I've been exploring the uses of Dadegan,  a database of Persian sentences that have been manually annotated with a syntactic analysis.

Here is a fairly simple example, where we search for the valence pattern of خوردن /khordan/ 'eat'

The first line shows the valence pattern.  Pink is the subject, yellow is the object (and the  را accusative marker is highlighted), and blue is the verb.

The screenshot doesn't show this, but when you put your mouse on the example sentences, various words in Farsi show the same highlights as the valence pattern.  In the example selected, من غذا خوردهام,  the subject is من /man/ 'I', the object is غذا /qaza/ 'food', and the verb is an inflected form of خوردن.

In the dependency analysis, the arc between the final verb and the subject is labelled فاعل ٫ /fa'al/ 'subject', and the arc between the object and the verb is labelled مفعول /mafa'ul/ 'object.

Each dependency analysis also has an abstract root, labelled ریشه ٫ /rishe/ 'root'.

Here is a more complex example of a screen shot from the Dadegan project:

This is a bit hard to interpret for a non-Persian speaker!

The analysis style is Dependency Grammar, in the style of Tesnĩere.   Here is what I understand so far:

The search is for the verb رسیدن /rasidan/  'arrive' .  The results are grouped by the type of valence pattern that appears with this verb.  When you click on a sentence, you see the dependency-tree analysis of it.

The first constituent is سنگئ که زورت نمی رسد, approximately 'the stone that you cannot move (?)'.
 This is connected by an arc to the word بکن, which is the first verb of the sentence.  The arc is labelled مفعول  'object/patient', so the first constituent is the object of the clause.
The relationship between بوشه and بکن is labelled فعل یار, which I think means something like 'co-verb'.  (It seems to be literally 'friend of the verb'.) بوشه کردن /bushe kardan/ is a compound 'do a kiss';

The last two words are linked by و 'and'.  The label between 'and' and its left sister is همپايه, which means 'cohort, equal'.

The main verb is بگذر, and I think this is the imperative of the verb گذر 'pass'.  A helpful person at Wordreference suggests the translation 'If you cannot drag a stone from your way, kiss it and change your path.'