Akiatu scratchpad (questions)

[Salmoneus]

I'll take it

Reduplicants can definitely become independent phonologically, with their own stress and so on, and you can get similar reductions in compounds (I think especially synonym compounds, I've been trying and failing to dig up the examples I thought I remembered). I don't know that they often end up getting used outside of reduplication constructions, though.

There's one sort of context in which similar sorts of reduction are common without reduplication, nicknames and such. Like: you get "Dave" by taking enough segments off the front of "David" to form a single closed syllable, even though those segments don't actually form a syllable in "David" itself.

Well, the thing I'm thinking of is that in Rawàng Ata, there's a word class I've called 'motifs', which modify both nouns and verbs, and effectively are a sort of compound (although they don't form compound words as such, as suffixes to the headword come before the motif)*. I know that a bunch of these motifs are derived from older adverbs or serial verb constructions (they often have meanings relating to manner and direction, although their use is largely lexical and no longer particularly productive).

But it occurs to me that if I can create derivatives through reduplication (which I can) and those derivatives can be separate words (which makes sense), then the original reduplicant can be reanalysed as the second word in a compound, and reapplied to other words, and this seems an appropriate origin for some of these 'motifs'. Particlarly once that form of reduplication has ceased being productive, and sound changes have obscured the relationship.

Perhaps something like a durative function originally?
From, say, tasata, 'to walk', you'd get tasata sata, 'to walk on and on'
Whereas pehati, 'to swing', you'd get pehati hati, 'to swing back and forth'
Add some sound changes and make that process non-productive, and you end up with pairs like:
tatta, 'to walk' vs. tatta sata, 'to walk away entirely'
pyati, 'to swing' vs. pyati hati, 'to swing away and then back'

And then I can generalise 'sata' to "to X away", and 'hati' as "to X away and return".

I'm not sure this can actually be productive enough for my purposes, but it's a fun idea.

Anyway, I'll stop hijacking now...


*the 'Ata' in the name of Rawàng Ata is one of these, conveying the sense of reciprocity between members of a group. Roughly, it changes the meaning from "being in concord" or "harmonising" to "all being in concord with one another" or "all harmonising with one another".

[akam chinjir]

ki (the definite determiner)

Yeah, that all makes sense to me. Reduplication + diachrony definitely sounds fun and productive.

And on to the next thing, the particle ki, which was one of Akiatu's first two or three words. It's accumulated a few adjustments since I last wrote about it, which affect things like relative clauses, and it's also just undergone one major phonological change. So maybe it's a good time for a survey.

The core use of ki is as a definite determiner when a nominal is definite (only) relative to some other element in the immediate linguistic context. That's to say: it's not used to mark already-established discourse topics or always-unique referents such as tiwana the sun.

Here's an example:

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ai  hau ki  tamwipaku mau tikwa ataisu   ma  (ki) apatu parimau tima       wa, sama
VOC 1s  DET canoe     top AP    look.for SUB DET  spear fetch   ready(PFV) CIS 2s
Look in my canoe and fetch the spear

apatu spear can be definite even without ki if we're already talking about a spear. With ki, it's definite only given something else in the immediate linguistic context, here most likely the reference to my canoe: the ki indicates that the spear (or spears) I want is precisely the one(s) in my canoe.

Compare: "go to the bar and talk to the manager." Which manager? The manager of that bar, whoever it is.

The lack of number marking in Akiatu makes these cases work somewhat differently there compared to English. If I in English I asked you to fetch the spear from my canoe, you'd be able to infer that there's exactly one spear in my canoe. In Akiatu, you'd just know that if there's more than one spear, then I want all of them.

The other ki in that example marks possession: hau ki tamwipaku is my canoe. The logic is the same as with apatu spear. I'm referring to a particular, identifiable canoe, but it's only the reference to the possessor that makes the phrase definite. (Structurally, I'm thinking of the possessor is going into spec-DP, which among other things means that a full DP, potentially with its own ki, can go there.)

(That's alienable possession. Inalienable possession looks just like compounding.---And actually, as a consequence, an inalienable possessor can't be a full DP.)

ki also shows up when it's something following the noun that makes it definite. This can happen with deictics, producing demonstratives.

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ki  apatu=su          ki  apatu=ku          ki  apatu=wati
DET spear=DEIC.1      DET spear=DEIC.2      DET spear=DEIC.3
this spear            that spear by you     that spear

It's also possible with adjectives:

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ki  apatu sakija         ki  apatu siwi
DET spear red            DET spear small
the red spear            the sharp spear

You'd use ki apatu sakija, for example, if you wanted all and only the red ones out of a collection that included spears of multiple colours---so it's the adjective that makes the phrase definite.

And also with relative clauses:

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ki  apatu kja kipaja hau hwati mawa
DET spear REL Kipaja 1s  give  find(PFV)
the spear that Kipaja gave me

Note that when ki is licensed by a relative clause, the relative clause will always be restrictive.

A ki-headed DP with a relative clause can be discontinuous, putting ki and the noun before the verb and the relative clause after:

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ai  ki  apatu parimau tima       kja kipaja hau hwati mawa,     sama
VOC DET spear fetch   ready(PFV) REL Kipaja 1s  give  find(PFV) 2s
Fetch the spear that Kipaja gave me

There's a subtlety here with nonfinite relative clauses. Consider the following two examples:

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hau ki  janaki wata na tawaru
1s  DET person see  DS laugh
I could see the person who was laughing

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hau janaki wata na tawaru
1s  person see  DS laugh
I saw a(/the) person singing

The difference is that with ki, the post-verbal clause is interpreted as a restrictive relative clause; without it, it's interpreted as a secondary predication (and in that case, the ki-less nominal will be interpreted as definite or indefinite according to context).

Oh, a note: all of this supercedes some earlier stuff about relative clauses and secondary predication. In particular, I hadn't settled on this use of ki when I wrote the posts on relative clauses.

Incidentally, there are pairs of pronouns that can head relative clauses with the same contrast in meaning, in some cases involving what it clearly a bound ki. For example, naki kja is someone who..., whereas kinai kja is the one who....

(But ki is not always present, for example with watiwi kja the place where..., and can also be obscured by sound changes, as in ani kja a time when... vs jani kja the time when..., with giani → gjani → jani.)

Anyway.

There's one more important use of ki, to allow nonfinite subordinate clauses to take a subject. (The alternative is either subject or object control.) In essence, the nonfinite clause gets used as an NP, and it can take a possessor/subject.

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hau ucisu na hjaci ki  hakjawi acatau
1s  want  DS Hjaci DET bonfire bless
I want Hjaci to bless the fire

(Contrast: hau ucisu mwi hakjawi acatau I want to bless the fire, with the same-subject complementiser mwi.)

Okay, so far that's updating and synthesising a bunch of things I've said so far. But now I think I need something new, phonology-wise.

The problem I'm facing is that as sentences get a bit more complex, it's not always immediaely obvious what role ki is playing. In particular, in a sequence of na ki followed by a noun, it's not immediately obvious whether the ki goes with the noun (and maybe a possessor has been dropped), or it goes with a whole following nonfinite clause (and the possessor/subject has been dropped). And it seems to me that the best way forward is to somehow distinguish the subject-licensing ki from the others.

I thought of just coming up with a different particle. Or maybe the subject of a nonfinite relative clause could be given with the ablative preposition hu. But I don't really want to give up the unity of all these constructions.

Meanwhile, though, I've been thinking of boundary processes, and trying to sort out where the various relevant prosodic boundaries might reasonably fall. I don't have that nailed down yet, but it should be totally reasonable to say that ki will be more bound, phonologically speaking, to a complement NP than to a full complement clause.

So when ki licenses a subject for a subordinate clause, it'll be relatively independent, phonologically speaking (though it still won't get its own stress). When it takes a regular NP complement, though, it'll reduce. There'll two possibilities:

• ki → k before h, j, w, or a vowel. A following h will drop, as will the following glide in a ji or wu sequence (though I'm thinking of eliminating these sequences word-initially, phonologically at least). Note that this will result in kjau sequences, which are not found word-internally.
• ki → i oherwise. (I'm thinking of this as involving an earlier gi → ji lenition.) ---Maybe once I've played with this more I'll decide that the homophony with the dative preposition i is no good; ja would also make some diachronic sense (via gi → ji → jɨ.)

You'll still get the full ki in slow, careful speech (maybe there'll still be enough difference in rhythm or intonation to distinguish the kinds of ki, not sure). But in any sort of regular speech you'll get the reduction.

And henceforth I'll indicate this orthographically (when I remember to, anyway). ki will become k= or i=, and an ellided consonant will be indicated with an apostrophe.

So here's the first example from above, under the new regimen:

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ai  hau i=  tamwipaku mau tikwa ataisu   ma  k=  apatu parimau tima       wa, sama
VOC 1s  DET=canoe     top AP    look.for SUB DET=spear fetch   ready(PFV) CIS 2s
Look in my canoe and fetch the spear

So that's where things stand with ki, a least for now.

[akam chinjir]

Locative subjects

Akiatu topics, as I've so far discussed them, are sort of weighty, discourse-pragmatics-wise. That's to say, they're never used just to track the continuing subject-matter of a stretch of discourse, they're used to reorient discourse, or introduce context or background. And this is one of the resaons why you might not want to say that Akiatu, as so far described, is not topic-prominent.

(This issue came up first, iirc, when I introduced passives; topic prominent languages tend to have little or no use for passives, because for most purposes you can just topicalise instead; but in Akiatu, when a `weighty' topic isn't appropriate you would still need a passive of some sort.)

But---in a few places recently I've felt a need for a lighter sort of topic, one appropriate when you just want to track a continuing subject-matter. I won't go into the details, suffice it to say I decided that what I'd do is mark such topics with the locative (or deictic) clitic =wati, and put them in the same position in the sentence where a subject would usually go.

Let me run through some examples.

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hau=wati akiwawi  kamaru
1s =LOC  head:POS hurt:INTR
My head hurts (= at me the head hurts)

Here you can see one of the rationales for allowing `light' topics: you've got an experiencer and a body part, the first the possessor of the second, but you don't really want them restricted to the same argument of the verb, since the first is likely topical whereas the second is more likely focal. There are lots of options here, but I went for non-canonical subjects.

(Why locative rather than dative? One thing is that the dative marker---the preposition i---consistently gets dropped before the verb, so a dative subject would look exactly the same as a regular one.)

The key points here are that kamaru hurt:INTR is an unaccusative verb---that's to say, its subject isn't an agent---and the sentence seems to express its theme twice, once as subject and once as object, with the subject taking the locative clitic =wati; moreover, the subject-theme is the inalienable possessor of the object-theme.

(You can't just read off from the sentence that hau=wati is, structurally speaking, the subject and akiwawi the object, but adverb placement and such would make it clear that's what's going on.)

One more thing before I go on. akiwa head appears here with the -wi suffix, which tends to produce nouns referring to natural collections. Body part terms end up a special case. First you have pairs like inai ear and inakwi ears, where the main sort of natural collection of ears is going to be a person's two ears. (In this case you also get an old coda k showing its face.) This gets reinterpreted, so it implies not so much that there's a collection of ears as that the ears are together as part of someone's body, and this to the point where swi could be used of singular body parts like akiwa head or, for that matter, for the ear of a one-eared person. That's to say, on words for body parts, -wi ends up being a marker of inalienable possessedness (and that's what the :POS in the gloss is supposed to mean).

Anyway, here's another example:

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taiwa=wati paja jaku      maka
roof =LOC  tie  stay(PFV) DIR:up
The house has been raised

Translation here is a bit tricky. Akiatu dwellings (and other buildings) consist of a roof raised on posts, with no permanent walls and with things fastened together mostly with rope; the verb sequence paja jaku maka tie in place up is a common way to describe the construction of such structures. (I don't think I've had occasion to mention directionals such as maka up before, here's an example. Unlike path verbs, they specify an absolute direction, not one relative to a point of reference.)

(In case you're wondering about external background, this translates an example from Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar, page 89.)

Here the verb is originally transitive. However, its semantic subject does not get expressed, and its object---that's to say, it's patient or theme---surfaces as a locative subject; for all intents and purposes the construction seems intransitive. In fact this is exactly the sort of thing you expect to find instead of passives in a topic-prominent language.

So in the presence of a locative subject, an intransitive verb like kamaru hurt can look transitive, and a transitive verb like paja tie, bind can look intransitive. Fun.

But let's go back to pain, because pain is interesting. (Actually Akiatu subjects have their origin in a reading of Reznikova, Rakhilina, and Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Towards a typology of pain predicates---which (ahem) should also be available here for those without institutional access to such things.) One thing about them: languages tend not to have many pain-specific predicates, instead drawing on vocabulary from other domains, especially burning, damage, movement, and sound.

So you might expect something like this:

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hau=wati tikwawi  hakjaru
1s =LOC  face:POS burn:INTR
My face is burning

Again we have an unaccusative verb with its theme or patient expressed with both a possessor and a possessed.

But one of the things that can happen with these borrowed pain predicates is that the borrowed verb will be sort of inapt in its aspect or valency, and things will have to get adjusted. For example, if you want to describe a pain as like having your eyes stabbed, your stab verb is likely going to want an agent. You could give it one (you could describe your eyes as stabbing you, for example), but that's not what I want. I kind of just want to drop the agent the way I did with paja tie, bind, and get something like this:

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hau=wati atawi   makjai
1s =LOC  eye:POS spear:TR
My eyes are spearing (? being speared?)

This verb starts out as transitive, taking an agent and a patient, but with the locative subject it no longer has an agent, and subject and object both refer to the patient, with the subject as the inalienable possessor of the patient.

(And if this is okay, then it should be possible to replace intransitive hakjaru burn in the previous example with transitive hakjasu.)

What all this implies is that you can use a locative subject with a verb that has a patient or theme argument, suppressing any agent, and giving yourself the option to mention the patient or theme twice, as both subject and object.

How might this pattern get extended?

You might think it could get extended to non-agent subjects in general, for example to perception verbs, but I don't want that.

But there will be verbs that take an experiencer as an object, and such an experiencer will often be topical, and warrant a locative subject. For example:

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itamu=wati jisaka wakiru
Itamu=LOC  fish   be.easy
Itamu likes fish

I can also imagine locative subjects in cases where the subject's lack of agency is marked:

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itamu=wati jisaka makjai jaku
Itamu=LOC  fish   spear  stay(PFV)
Itamu speared the fish (e.g. by accident)

Or maybe you could use it when it's control more than agency that's lacking, maybe something like this:

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itamu=wati makjai wara        a   jisaka
Itamu=LOC  spear  around(PFV) LOC fish
Itamu speared away at the fish

(I feel sure that jisaka fish shouldn't be a direct object in this example, maybe it shouldn't be in the previous one either.)

Finally, I can actually use this construction to make sense of something I had very early on, and which I think I've never really made sense of, namely existential constructions:

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ikjamii kura ihjaisa pijatu
river   bank bat     be.hanging
There is a bat (/ are bats) by the river.

This uses another sort of locative marker (the relational noun kura bank, shore), and in the earliest version required the indefinite noun to go after the verb (now it's enough that it's the object rather than the subject), but otherwise it matches the use of locative subjects I've been introducing. I like it.

Anyway, that's what I have for locative subjects.

And maybe it leaves me with a language that's genuinely topic prominent. Anyway where there used to be a position in the structure of Akiatu sentences that I thought of as the place for the syntactic subject, now that position can be occupied by at least themes, in virtue not of their semantic relation to the verb but of their topicality. (I guess it remains to be seen whether arbitrary arguments---e.g. recipients---can show up as locative subjects.)

There's actually a fair bit to say here about how information structure has taken over Akiatu syntax, tying in things about objects and focus. And I guess I'll have to decide if I still want explicit, grammaticalised passives. But I'll leave all that for another time.

[akam chinjir]

Raising and control, again

Rather a long time ago I said that there's no pure raising in Akiatu. (It was long enough ago that I'll repeat myself a bit, but here is the earlier post.)

Take this sentence:

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itamu₁ itakitai mwi ____₁ rawu
Itamu  seem     SS        feel.good
Itamu₁ seems ____₁ to be satisfied

There's a sort of analysis that makes itamu the semantic subject only of rawu feel good and not of itakitai seem, just like you'd get in itakitai kja itamu rawu it seems that Itamu is satisfied. What I said in the earlier post was that this sort of analysis doesn't work for Akiatu, that the surface subject of the matrix clause has to be interpreted as its semantic subject as well, and the example sentence is a case of control rather than raising. That's to say, the sentence says that there's something about Itamu that makes her seem satisfied.

As a consequence, I said you couldn't have a sentence like this:

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*itamu₁ itakitai mwi ____₁ miwa suwi
 Itamu  seem     SS        NEG  here
 Itamu₁ seems ____₁ not to be here

This was supposed to be no good because there's no way to think of Itamu's apparent absence as a characteristic specifically of her---there is no way to construe Itamu as the semantic subject of the matrix verb.

I have to go back to this because the idea that the surface subject must be the semantic subject is out the window, even ignoring explicit passives. It's out the window because of how information structure has been taking over Akiatu syntax.

Consider "Itamu seems not to be here." Whether or not apparent nonabsence is a genuine property (I'm assuming it's not), the sentence is clearly about Itamu. There are cases where it would be appropriate to topicalise with wai, like this:

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itamu wai itakitai kja  miwa suwi
Itamu TOP seem     COMP NEG  here
As for Itamu, she seems not to be here

But there are also going to be the cases, like the ones I discussed last time, where an already-topical nominal really belongs in the position normally taken by subjects.

Luckily, the locative subjects I introduced last time seem perfect here, yielding this:

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itamu=wati₁ itakitai mwi ____₁ miwa suwi
Itamu=LOC   seem     SS        NEG  here
Itamu₁ seems ____₁ not to be here

So here's a nice subtle bit of grammar and metaphysics: the subject of itakitai must be locative if the embedded clause isn't ascribing a genuine property.

This actually allows me to improve on the example with the wai-marked topic:

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itamu₁ wai itakitai mwi ____₁ miwa suwi
Itamu  TOP seem     COMP NEG  here
Itamu seems not to be here

(Why is this an improvement? Because in neither case does the subordinate clause really have indepentent time reference---the time of the absence is guaranteed to be the time of the seeming----so there's no point in having it be finite.)

Another example I mentioned in the previous post was "It was decided that Hjaci would go to the ocean." You can't simply raise "Hjaci" to the matrix clause, because "Hjaci decided to go to the ocean" would have an entirely different meaning. The point in the earlier post was that in Akiatu even a verb like itakitai works in this way. Now though I can say about the opposite, that in Akiatu it's possible to raise to subject even with a verb meaning decide. Contrast the following two examples:

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hjaci₁ tapikau kaku       mwi ____₁ wamau a   mikuwi hatau ka
Hjaci  plan    REDUP(INC) SS        go    LOC waters great TRANS
Hjaci₁ decided ____₁ to go to the ocean

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hjaci=wati₁ tapikau kaku       mwi ____₁ wamau a   mikuwi hatau ka
Hjaci=LOC   plan    REDUP(INC) SS        go    LOC waters great TRANS
It was decided that Hjaci go to the ocean

I like it.

It should also be possible to raise a focused element to object. Like this:

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hau₁ jisaka=su₂ ucisu mwi ____₁ ____₂ piwa
1s   fish  =FOC want  SS              eat
I want to eat *fish*

In this particular case you might say that jisaka fish makes sense as a semantic object of the verb ucisu want, which maybe makes things tricky. But there's also this:

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hau₁ jisaka=su₂ tapikau mwi ____₁ ____₂ piwa
1s   fish  =FOC plan    SS              eat
I plan to eat *fish*

This makes sense to me. (It even makes sense to me without the explicit focus marker, but that's a topic for another day.)

[akam chinjir]

Resultatives, again

A general note: the Akiatu lexicon is going through a slow but fairly major iteration, so if you read newer posts alongside older ones you might stumble over some changes.

That said, I've been doing a bit of reading about resultative constructions, and it's time to revisit this issue in Akiatu.

Background

Akiatu resultatives are expressed using serial verbs, the first generally giving an action or event and the second a result.

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itamu jisaka piwa aja
Itamu fish   eat  away
Itamu ate the fish

I'll call the result verb in such a construction the resultative complement.

(aja is actually a bit of a special case, arguably more a particle than a verb; as a main verb it requires the augment -tu, yielding ajatu throw.)

One important wrinkle: when there's a resultative complement, the resulting sense is perfective, as above. This can be overridden using either ijau sit for progressive or waicu lie down for habitual. Here's an example with ijau:

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itamu ijau      jisaka piwa aja
Itamu sit(PROG) fish   eat  away(PFV)
Itamu was eating up the fish

Telicity

A resultative complement supplies the event being described with an end point or goal: it renders the predicate telic. For example, you can't be said to jisaka piwa aja unless your eating has as its end point the consumption of all the fish.

In the normal case, as in the first example above, the use of the resultative complement implies that the goal was achieved. This is no longer implied when ijau makes the predicate progressive: the second example does not strictly entail that all the fish was eventually eaten up (though there's probably a Gricean implicature to that effect, when talking about the past, at least).

Constructions like the habitual that imply repeated action, when applied to resultatives, imply the repeated achievement of the result.

One thing that's only recently come into focus for me: a telic transitive verb generally places demands on its object, namely that it either be definite or have an explicit amount. That's why I translated jisaka as "the fish," above.

I don't know how obvious this is; maybe not obvious at all given how long it's taken me to see it. The idea is that eat fish can't be telic, because it doesn't specify how much fish you need to eat before you're done; whereas both eat three fish and eat the fish are telic---the first by specifying the amount and the second by assuming that the listener already knows the amount. You even get this effect with verbs that you might think of as inherently telic: won a race and won the race are telic but won races is not.

The cash value of all this is that when a bare nominal occurs as the object of a verb, and there's a resultative complement, then the nominal must be interpreted definitely. (The lack of number-marking in Akiatu means that bare nominals are very common.)

A wrinkle. itu is the cardinal number one, used for example in
counting and in constructing higher numbers. But simply added to a noun, it
marks indefiniteness rather than number. For example, jisaka itu is
some fish, with no indication of number (it doesn't even specify a
count rather than a mass interpretation of the head noun). (Aside: English
"fish" is a good guide to Akiatu nouns because, like them, it doesn't mark
number and cares very little for the mass/count distinction.)

What that means is, sentences like the following are ungrammatical:

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*itamu jisaka itu  piwa aja
 Itamu fish   some eat  away(PFV)
 Itamu ate up some fish

(This would be grammatical if itu one were replaced by a number higher than two. For one fish or two fish, you would use the adjectives ahiwa and iruwa, respectively.)

You can still do something like this, using a presentative construction with a relative clause:

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jisaka ijau na  itamu piwa aja
fish   sit  REL Itamu eat  away(PFV)
Itamu ate up some fish

One last point about telicity. When a verb inherently specifies a result or goal, you can use partial reduplication to indicate that the result is actually achieved. (I talked about how partial reduplication works not too long ago, but I didn't then have this use in mind.)

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hjaci amawaitu  kitu       a   hakjawi
Hjaci go.around REDUP(TEL) LOC bonfire
Hjaci went around the bonfire (all the way to the other side).

(Without the telic complement, amawaitu would often mean go around, to the side of.)

Valency

Normally, a resultative complement takes a single theme argument. For example, the single argument of aja is something that moves away or outward (possibly in a metaphorical sense).

In the easiest cases, the main verb will itself take a theme argument, and the two verbs can share a theme. That's what we saw above with jisaka piwa aja: jisaka fish is the theme both of piwa eat and of aja away.

Unaccusative verbs can also share a theme with a resultative, though in this case the theme will surface as the subject:

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tamwi hajkaru aja
wood  burn    away(PFV)
The wood burned away

There are three possibilities with unergative verbs, which do not have a theme argument.

First, some unergative verbs---at least including path verbs---simply allow a resultative:

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itamu wamau hatu        a   ikjamii wa
Itamu come  arrive(PFV) LOC river   CIS
Itamu came to the river

(I think path verbs are sometimes considered unaccusative, in some languages? Anyway French aller and venir take the unaccusative auxiliary être. I guess that could be what's going on here as well, though in my opinion that doesn't really suit the semantics of these verbs.)

Second, you can (ahem) de-unergativise the verb by using a locative subject:

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itamu=wati papija wukau
Itamu=LOC  jump   be.tired(PFV)
Itamu danced herself tired

Third, the resultative can license an additional argument, which surfaces as the object of the serial verb:

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itamu hjaci papija wukau
Itamu Hjaci jump   be.tired(PFV)
Itamu danced Hjaci tired

You could in principle do this with a reflexive, yielding a (more English-like) alternative to the previous example that emphasises the agency of the subject:

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itamu tikwa papija wukau
Itamu REFL  jump   be.tired(PFV)
Itamu danced herself tired

But I'm inclined to think this sort of construction would be rare.

The second and third of the above possibilities are also available with transitive verbs, in which case the main verb no longer selects an object:

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itamu=wati piwa rawu
Itamu=LOC  eat  satisfied(PFV)
Itamu ate herself full

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aipa cacija tawaru wasu
Aipa baby   sing   sleep(PFV)
Aipa sang the baby to sleep

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aipa tikwa tawaru wasu
Aipa REFL  sing   sleep(PFV)
Aipa sang himself to sleep

(The object of tawaru sing would normally be the words or the song, though in fact it often occurs in the antipassive.)

As you likely can appreciate, these constructions are rich with causative potential. While you can always use the more grammaticalised causatives with jai do and hwati give (here's the post, but with ahjai rather than jai), resultative constructions will be a common alternative.

There are at least a couple of common resultatives that don't obviously fit with what I've been saying.

First, mawa find. In its non-resultative use it's transitive, and you might think that a construction like ataisu mawa look.for find should be interpreted as a compound made up of two transitive verbs that, in effect, take the same subject and object (X looks for Y and X finds Y). But that doesn't sit well with the ideas above, and there are examples that can't be interpreted that way, for example, in the common hwati mawa give find it's certainly not that X both gives and finds Y. In fact, when mawa is used as a resultative, it's probably best to interpret it as implicitly passivised: X gives Y and Y is found (by the recipient). (Cf. aku mawa be.born find.)

Second, tau (come) together:

Code: Select all

itamu sati hjaci anatu tau
Itamu COM  Hjaci meet  together(PFV)
Itamu and Hjaci met

With a plural subject and no object, as here, there's no real mystery here. But sometimes tau is used to imply that the subject and the object come together:

Code: Select all

itamu hjaci wata tau
Itamu Hjaci see  together(PFV)
Itamu saw Hjaci

There's an implication here that the seeing was mutual, that it connected Itamu and Hjaci somehow, a bit as if the theme of tau were the pair Itamu and Hjaci, even though no argument of the verb refers to both of them at once.

Motion descriptions

A verb-framed language is one in which the verbs used to describe motion characterise the path along which the motion takes place, but not the manner of motion or other accompanying factors (such as the nature of the mover or the medium).

Since nearly the beginning, I've thought of Akiatu as verb-framed. Motion descriptions use path verbs, and only path verbs can introduce goal arguments. If you want to say not just that Itamu went to the river, but also that she ran there, you need to describe her as running in some sort of adjunct (for example in a secondary predicate or an adverbial clause).

But: it turns out that, cross-linguistically, verb-framed languages (such as Japanese or the Romance languages) are very restricted in the resultative constructions they allow, far more restricted than Akiatu is. So it's no coincidence that the main languages that were influencing Akiatu's resultatives (namely English and Mandarin) are not verb-framed.

To be honest, I'm not yet sure how this will play out. Currently I'm inclined to say this:

1. In Akiatu (unlike English) a resultative phrase must be headed by a verb; thus by itself i ikjamii to the river can't be a resultative phrase, whether on a manner-of-motion verb or otherwise (normally in fact it'll mean towards the river)
2. Only certain path verbs (notably wamau come, go) can directly select a goal argument (which will actually take locative a rather than dative i), but these can serve as resultative complements to other verbs, including manner-of-motion verbs. (The fact that these path verbs introduce another argument makes them unlike other resultatives. I suspect they can also co-occur with other resultatives, not sure yet.)
3. Meanwhile Akiatu will still resemble verb-framed languages in some respects: it has a rich array of path verbs, and they will often occur without any description of the manner of motion; and there's no monoclausal way to describe a series of paths (so within a single clause you cannot describe someone going out the door, along the path, up the hill, and around the tree, for example---you'd need a separate verb and a separate clause for each path).

Maybe once I have a firmer grasp of the underlying syntax here I'll be able to say more, but that's it for now.

[akam chinjir]

Stress

This is a little update---I'm planning posts on clitics and compounds, and those'll mention how clitics and compounds affect stress, so I thought I'd put something up about how stress works in simpler cases, since that's changed since my initial phonology post (which is here, though increasingly out of date).

First I'll set out the way it usually works.

A syllable counts as heavy just in case its rhyme is ai or au; a syllable that is not heavy is light. (The rhyme of a light syllable will be a, i, or u.)

A word divides into feet, from the right, with all feet taking one of the shapes heavy-light, light-light, or heavy. (I originally disallowed feet with a single heavy syllable, and allowed heavy-light-light feet.) The word's first syllable might be left unfooted.

The first syllable in each foot gets stress; the rightmost stressed syllable in a word gets primary stress.

There's a rule that a syllable with primary stress must be heavy. If it is underlyingly light, it will gain weight in one of two ways: a following j or w will geminate, resulting in a phonetic diphthong or long vowel; or the syllable's vowel will lengthen.

Here are some examples, with parentheses used to distinguish feet:

akijatu	(ˌa.ki)(ˈjaː.tu)]	Akiatu
sakija	sa(ˈkij.ja)	red, bright
piwa	(ˈpiw.wa)	eat
tajau	ta(ˈjau)	maybe
saukajasu	(ˌsau.ka)(ˈjaa.su)	be white
tautikwa	(ˌtau)(ˈtiː.kwa)	one another

I said that's how it usually works; there are two kinds of exceptional case.

First, ideophones can work somewhat differently. For one thing, they can include geminate plosives, and these render the preceding syllable heavy. For another, some ideophones show an iambic rather than a trochaic pattern (though with feet still assigned from the word's right edge).

Second, there are some lexical exceptions: words whose final syllable receives stress even though their rhymes are neither ai nor au. Phonetically at least, these words have a final long vowel.

I originally accounted for these exceptions by positing doubled vowels, aa, ii, and uu, which can occur only word-finally. These render syllables that contain them heavy, and those syllables then get their own feet and thereby attract stress.

I've changed my mind about this, in large part because I don't like how it interacts with partial reduplication (the rules of which are here). An underlying form like ikjahuu would reduplicate as huku---including both copies of u and with k inserted to satisfy the CVCV template. If I want the reduplicant to be instead kahu---and I do---then the underlying segments can only be ikjahu.

So now I think these exceptions involve a suprasegmental diacritic of some sort. In principle it could represent either length (which would then attract stress) or stress (which would lengthen the vowel), and I don't suppose it matters much which it is. Orthographically, though, it's convenient in some other contexts to mark stress with an acute accent, and that's what I'll use here, so for the time being I'll say the exceptions involve lexically-marked stress. (And there'll be cases where this affects how vowels coalesce, so actually it maybe matters a bit.)

A few examples:

ikjahú	(ˌi.kja)(ˈhuː)	admire, revere
haticí	(ˌha.ti)(ˈciː)	sneeze
kijá	ki(ˈjaː)	mud

So that's the basic stress regimen (which gets a bit more complex in compounds and with clitics).

Edit. Oops, one more thing. I've been assuming a bimoraic minimum for content words, but I've got at least one that's no longer bimoraic, namely kú manage to (formerly *kuu). I think I'll just give up on the minimality requirement. kú never occurs in contexts that'll call for partial reduplication, so I don't really need to decide how it'd do that, but I guess the result would be kuku, in order to satisfy the CVCV template.

[akam chinjir]

Some morphophonology

EDIT: this post has been entirely superseded by the following one.

Akiatu phonotactic constraints have force not only within roots but also in morphologically complex words and across clitic boundaries; so adjustments are frequently required. This post sets out some of the more productive processes.

There are two main issues: what to do with vowel sequences (only tautosyllabic ai and au are legal), and how to prevent j occurring next to u.

I'll begin with vowel sequences. Only tautosyllabic ai and au are legal, and the following rules enforce that restriction:

• a+i → ai, a+u → au
  

  sama=ijau → sa.mai.jau you are sitting

• a+a → a, i+i → i, u+u → u
  

  hau=ucisu → hau.ci.su I want

  The monosegmental prepositions a and i do not trigger this rule.
• i → j / { a t k h }_V; resulting tj → c
  
  u → w / { a p m k h }_V
  

  sati=aipa → sa.cai.pa with Aipa
  aiku-itai → ai.kwi.tai leaf rope; garland

• V → ∅ / _V
  
  This is the elsewhere rule, which comes into play only when all else fails.
  

  jakwi=akjanai → ja.kwa.kja.nai you (pl) are strangers

Two things. These rules can be bled by allomorphy; in particular, some words have allomorphs with final coda consonants, and these can surface before vowels (e.g., hau=ataurika → hu.ra.tau.ri.ka I am happy). And the above rules can themselves result in illegal forms, particulularly forms that violate constraints on the distribution of u, to which I now turn.

There are two restrictions on u: it cannot occur next to j, and it cannot occur in a syllable with a branching onset. Repair in the latter case is simple:

• u → i / { pw mw kj kw hj hw }a?_

In the former case---when cliticisation or compounding puts a u next to a j---two outcomes are possible: either u → i or j → w.

• hju always becomes hji and kju always becomes kji, in accordance with the previous rule.
• Otherwise, if a clitic is attaching to a host, it's the host that changes.
• Otherwise, it's the leftmost morpheme that changes. Edit: Oops, that was a mistake: if the second of the vowels is supplied by an enclitic, then it deletes; otherwise it's the first that deletes. (There's actually only one vowel-initial enclitic, though, namely the topicaliser aka, so you might think of it as a lexical exception.)

(It's possible that there will turn out to be some j-initial roots that aren't simply produced by substituting w, but I doubt there'll be another productive pattern.)

Some examples:

jakwi=ucisu → ja.kwi.ci.su you (pl) want (via ja.kwu.ci.su)
miku-ausu → mi.kwai.su waterblood (via mikwausu; I don't actually know what this means yet)

There's a final pair of rules that aren't needed for repair:

• i → ∅ / a_j
• u → ∅ / u_w

itijau-waku → i.ti.ja.wa.ku push-pull; stretch (transitive)

Note that these final two rules apply only in morphologically derived environments, the sequences aij and auw are perfectly legal within roots.

Oh, and I guess I'll starting giving both broadly phonetic transcriptions and morphological analyses when I do fully glossed examples. Something like this:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ ɪˈjɐj.jə.kʊ ə.tɐˈmwiw.wə.tɪ
itamu ijau=P.REDUP a=tamwi=wati
Itamu sit =INC.PFV LOC=tree =LOC
Itamu sat by the tree

(It's convenient to gloss reduplication that way, with P.REDUP for partial reduplication and F.REDUP for full reduplication, but I don't mean to imply that reduplication should be explained by positing dedicated REDUP morphemes.)

[akam chinjir]

Phonological do-over

There are enough little things wrong or incomplete with the previous post that I'm just doing it over again from scratch.

(Fun fact: Akiatu has the ridiculously simple phonology and morphology it does precisely because I can disappear for weeks at a time into morphophonological rabbit holes, and end up with nothing to show for it. At one point I actually managed to devote over a week of conlanging time to the question of whether Akiatu glides are phonologically distinct from the high vowels---a question I'll actually mostly answer below.)

The glides

In Akiatu, syllable-initial glides represent segments that are phonologically distinct from the high vowels.

The Akiatu lexicon includes plenty of cases of ji and wu and (across syllable boundaries) ij and uw. If these are really ii and uu sequences, they are the only attested sequences of identical segments. Moreover, j never occurs next to u, and this restriction is enforced by active phonological processes, but both iw and wi are common; distinguishing the high vowels from the glides makes these patterns and processes much easier to state.

It's also not the case that syllable-initial glides can have been inserted to repair instances of vowel hiatus. This would not explain their occurrence word-initially, where we find such near-minimal pairs as jiwaɲi shoulder vs iwani transcendence, and wutamwi post vs utami vanish, become extinguished. And we find both aji and awu, even though ai and au are both perfectly legal sequences, for example in ajiki goose and w in rawu be satisfied.

Phonological processes also distinguish word-initial glides from the high vowels: within a clitic group, i drops before another i and u before another u, but they do not drop before j and w.

So syllable-initial glides do not represent underlying high vowels.

The offglides in the diphthongs ai and au seem to work both ways: they drop both before i and u and before j and w.

Similarly with the medial glides in syllables with complex onsets: they sometimes do clearly represent underlying vowels, but they're outside the syllable nucleus and do not contribute to syllable weight. (I'll continue to write them as glides.)

It's maybe worth remarking that if you believe in markedness, there are reasons to think that in Akiatu it's j that's the more marked of the two glides.

Prosodic domains

Stress assignment has as its primary domain units that we might intuitively classify as words. I'll assume these are phonological words.

The processes I talked about last time all take place in a domain constituted by a single phonological word together with the clitics it hosts. This I guess is a clitic group--though I may not need a domain intermediate between this and intonational phrases, in which case this might just as well be considered a phonological or prosodic phrase.

(The process of glide insertion that I mention below does have an intermediate domain of some sort, but I'm so far expecting it to be fairly idiosyncratic; a bit more on that below.)

I do need to sort out a treelike structure of phonological phrases before I can fully sort out intonation, but so far that looks to me like a different issue. But I so far have only a very shallow understanding of this stuff.

I don't plan anything very surprising for intonational phrases, but again they'll be more relevant for intonation than they are (at least so far) for the sorts of phonological process I'm talking about here.

The rest of this post will be about various processes that take place between morphemes. A reminder: this repeats or replaces what I put in the previous post.

Vowel deletion (i)

Rule. Within a clitic group, the first of two identical vowels separated by a morpheme boundary deletes.

Corollary. The offglide from a diphthong will delete before either the homorganic vowel or the homorganic glide.

That it's the first vowel that deletes may be of only orthographic significance.

Note that the result is a vowel of regular length.

And also that the corollary does not apply within roots: both aij and auw are perfectly legal sequences there.

Diphthongisation

Rule. Within a clitic group, when a high vowel follows a across a morpheme boundary, the result will be a diphthong. If this takes place within a phonological word, the resulting heavy syllable will attract stress, as you might expect. If instead they are separated by a clitic boundary the resulting syllable will be stressed only if the vowel supplied by the host was already stressed.

Glide formation

I'm not at all happy with how I stated this rule in the previous post, with the environment given just as a list of preceding consonants. Gross!

The basic idea is that you'll get i→j/C_ and u→w/C_ when the result is a legal complex onset. Here's a go at placing conditions on the C.

First off, u→w occurs only after p, m, k, and h. As far as place is concered, these are all [-coronal].

i→j occurs at least after k and h. I also want it to occur after t and n, followed by [+alveolar]→[+palatal]/_j. And I see no harm in letting it happen after palatal consonants, which can then simply absorb the resulting glide. So I'll say i→j only occurs after a [-labial] consonant.

As for manner of articulation, the main thing is that glide formation does not take place after s, r, j, or w; it does take place after plosives, nasals, and h. h might have to be a special case; otherwise, glide formation takes place just after [-continuant] consonants. An alternative would be to think of h as actually ʔ, phonologically speaking. (A long time ago and for no particular reason I decided that hj would often be [ʔj]; now this seems maybe precient.)

Rule 1. Within a clitic group, i→j / [-continuant, -labial]_V.

Rule 2. Within a clitic group, u→w / [-continuant, -coronal]_V.

Note that these rules are bled by the vowel deletion rule, above; for example, ki+i becomes ki rather than kji. They also assume that h is somehow getting counted as [-continuant].

Corollary 1. [+alveolar] → [+palatal] / _j.

Corollary 2. j→∅ / [+palatal]_.

Note that the first of these corollaries feeds the second.

Corollary 3. u→i / CGV?_.

This enforces the ban on u in a syllable with a complex onset. Note that this can result in kji, a syllable shape that never occurs in roots.

Vowel deletion (ii)

Rule. Within a clitic group, the first of two consecutive vowels separated by a morpheme boundary deletes.

For what it's worth, given how head-initial compounds work (I'll talk about that fairly soon, I think), and given Akiatu's inventory of enclitics, the dropped vowel is guaranteed to come from the more dependent of the two morphemes. (I'm assuming that word-class-changing affixes are morphological heads.)

*uj

The sequence uj is strictly banned, at least within clitic groups. This is dealt with in two ways:

Rule 1. j→w / u=_.

Rule 2. Within a clitic group, u→i / _j.

The second of these two rules also applies sporadically within phonological phrases. (But u j is always acceptable across boundaries between intonational phrases.)

Edit. This is unclear and probably also wrong. Within a clitic group and also in some other cases within a phonological phrase, u-j will become either u-w (Rule 1) or i-j (Rule 2). The rule is that when this occurs across a clitic boundary, it is the host that changes, and otherwise it is the first word that changes. Thus, j→w occurs only when a u-final proclitic like cu or hu attaches to a j-initial host.

Glide insertion

A glide is sometimes inserted before a word-initial vowel, eliminating hiatus. I haven't sorted out the exact conditions under which this will happen, but expect them to be idiosyncratic. I'm thinking of French liaison as a possible model. My current plan is to see what feels right in individual cases, and then see what I can say about any resulting patterns.

The inserted glide will usually be j if both vowels are i, but otherwise will usually be w; this process respects the ban on putting j next to u. The glide will be syllabified with the following word.

A phonetic detail: the inserted glide will be somewhat shorter than a glide that's present underlyingly, and the preceding vowel will accordingly be slightly lengthened.

Glottal insertion

A glottal segment will be inserted before any remaining word-initial vowels. For most speakers this will usually be ʔ, but h is also possible. (Maybe there's support here for thinking of ordinary Akiatu h as representing an underlying glottal stop.)

As with epenthetic glides, the inserted segment will be shorter than a regular onset, and the preceding vowel will accordingly gain a bit of length.

[akam chinjir]

Clitics

I'm going to put the table up front so it's easy to find.

Class	Citation form	Attachment	Variant	Allomorphy	Free form	Detail
Interrogative determiners	nai	proclitic	na	na / _u	(nai)	human
	ti	proclitic			(tí)	other animate
	cu	proclitic			(cú)	inanimate
Prepositions	a	proclitic		h / _V	(á)	locative
	i	proclitic		j / _V	(í)	dative
	hu	proclitic		w / _V	(hú)	ablative
	sati	proclitic			sati	commitative
	niwa	proclitic			niwa	instrumental
Negation particles	miwa	proclitic			miwa	stative
	hwi	proclitic		hwai / _V	hwai	nonstative
Definite determiner	ki	either			kí	ki
Deictics	su	enclitic			sú	1 (proximate)
	ku	enclitic			kú	2 (by you)
	wati	enclitic			wati	3 (other)
Complementisers	kja	enclitic			kija	finite, realis
	sai	enclitic	sa		sai	irrealis
	mwi	enclitic			(mwí)	nonfinite, same-subject
	na	enclitic			(ná)	nonfinite
Topic particles	wai	enclitic			(wai)	new topic, context
	aka	enclitic		ka / V_	(aka)	presupposition
Motion complements	wa	enclitic			wá	cislocative
	ka	enclitic			ká	translocative
	wara	enclitic			wara	back-and-forth

Quick notes:

• Maybe I'll end up deciding the pronouns can be clitics, but for now I'm thinking they'll drop before they occur unstressed.
• The variants given for nai and sai are dialectal; they avoid unstressed ai (normally something like [ɛ]). But maybe they'll still use nai before a vowel (where it would become naj).
• I give ka as an allomorph of aka after vowels, but it will always follow a vowel. I'll come back to this below.
• The free forms given in parentheses are very rare.

I'll continue with more detailed discussion of some particulars.

Overview

The words I'm calling clitics are independent words, syntactically speaking, but are phonologically deficient in virtue of not bearing stress. Because of this they require phonological hosts: stress-bearing words to which they can attach.

How exactly clitics differ from true affixes depends on how affixation relates to syntax. I hope it's enough to say here that whereas affixes combine with heads, clitics combine with phrases, and take as their phonological host whatever lexical item they end up next to.

An example. The deictic clitic =su (which is also used as a focus particle) combines with a noun phrase, in which it is the final element, and will be hosted by whatever word precedes it in that phrase. This can be the head noun, but it could also be an adjective or a number or whatever word concludes a relative clause (likely a verb). (The behaviour of English 's is comparable.)

One detail: multiple clitics can share a host. For example, hwi=niwa=ki= NEG=INST=DET= seems like it should be possible. Though likely in such a case a stressed variant of one of the clitics would be used instead, to avoid such a long sequence of unstressed syllable.

In Akiatu, clitics are phonologically integrated with their hosts to a very large degree: all the segmental adjustments I discussed last time also take place between a clitic and its host. So far their only phonological difference from affixes is in how they relate to stress, an issue I'll take up next.

Stress

A clitic never receives stress. This distinguishes them from suffixes, at least, which will be stressed or not according to the regular stress-assigning algorithm. For example, the agent-noun-forming suffix -nai attracts stress, because it is heavy; but the enclitic =sai is never stressed, even though it consists of a syllable that is underlyingly heavy.

Proclitics and monosyllabic enclitics also do not affect stress. The suffix -wi turns wamíka air, wind into wamikáwi storm, for example, shifting stress to the new penult (I'm indicating stress with an acute accent). But the clitic =su will leave stress alone, yielding wamíka=su.

Bisyllabic enclitics can affect stress, though. When there is no other clitic intervening---by far the most common case---they shift stress to their host's final syllable. Accordingly, for example, itámu will become itamú=wati by Itamu.

Free forms

Akiatu clitics have variants that can occur as phonologically independent words (these are given in the table above). This isn't very common, though, and in some cases (the forms given in parentheses) it's very rare.

The free forms will be used for emphasis, naturally enough. One situation in which they'll be used is in cases of contrastive parallelism, to forestall or correct misunderstanding or to express disagreement. ("She didn't come to the village, she came from the village.") This is more or less the only sort of situation in which the rare, parenthesised forms would appear.

A free forms relates to its corresponding bound, cliticising forms in one of three ways. In two cases, it's just a separate form: kija corresponding to kja and hwai corresponding to hwi. Otherwise, bisyllabic clitics are simply assigned stress according to the usual algorithm (so miwa becomes míwa), and monosyllabic clitics have their one syllable lexically specified for stress (so ki becomes kí).

aka

The topic particle aka is ka after a vowel, but since all Akiatu words end in vowels, that means it will always be ka. Why then say it has an initial syllable that's always dropped?

There's just one thing: aka behaves like (other) bisyllabic enclitics, and unlike monosyllabic ones, because it attracts stress to its host's final syllable, so I supply a vowel to render it underlyingly bisyllabic. I choose a because the (rare) corresponding free form is in fact aka.

ki

The determiner ki can be either a proclitic (attaching to the right) or an enclitic (attaching to the left). Which it is depends on the nature of its complement. When its complement is an NP, it's a proclitic, but when its complement is verbal (a VoiceP, to be precise, at least in my current thinking) then it's an enclitic.

A few posts back (here) I said some things about the phonology of ki. That's all superceded by this post and the last one: it's direction of attachment and resulting phonological and prosodic differences that distinguish the two main uses of ki.

Complementisers and topic particles

The complementisers and topic particles are all enclitics, attaching to the left. This is contrary to what you might expect given the syntax, if you think of them as heads in the clause's left perphery: it would be natural to expect them to attach to their complements, rather than to whatever precedes them.

But let's consider cases.

Even supposing that the topic partical wai projects a TopicP and has the embedded clause as its complement, intuitively its main business is providing a landing site for the actual topic, which ends up in its specifier. And the same is true with the other topic particle aka.

It's a bit more complicated with complementisers, but they're still guaranteed to follow a potential host. There are two kinds of case to consider.

First, when a complementiser heads a clause that's subordinate to some other sentence element, it always follow that element. This might be a verb that selects a clausal complement, the noun head of a relative clause, or the antecedent (or whatever---not sure of my terminology here) of a secondary predicate. Note that Akiatu does not have truly headless relative clauses; conceivably this is in part precisely because the complementisers require a preceding host.

Second, the complementisers can provide a landing site for various things that don't otherwise have a place at the front of the sentence. kja most often takes an adverbial specifier, as in time adverbial clauses: tija kja itamu papija... while Itamu danced (with tija now). Irrealis sai is used most often with question words (cu sai...? what... ?), but can also take adverbials, including ideophones.

In any case it's fair to say that the complementisers and topic particles are oriented towards their left even if they take a complement to their right.

(I'm inclined to think something similar is going on with ki: it finds its host to its left precisely when it's providing a landing site for the subject of the embedded clause. But the case isn't straightforward, in part because the subject can be phonologically null.)

Resultative complements and clitic compounds

Phonologically speaking, resultative complements are clitics. They always have the shape CVCV, in line with the language's rule for partial reduplicants. To repeat an example from an earlier post, the reduplicant form of ijau sit is jaku, and the very same form can be used as a resultative complement on arbitrary verbs (with a meaning more like stay, be fixed in place than like sit).

Given their consistently bisyllabic shape, these clitics always shift stress to the final syllable in their host. For example, wáɲi think, say becomes waɲí=jaku settle, decide (PFV).

As you might expect, these clitics are most often hosted by the main verb, but there can be exceptions, especially involving saka manage and kú fail, as in suwasu saká=wasu manage to fall asleep.

There are also words that I'm calling clitic compounds. I'll talk more about these in a separate post about compounds, but these are compounds whose second element is phonologically deficient; just like bisyllabic enclitics, they cannot receive stress, but attract stress to the final syllable of their host. Verb-object compounds (mostly if not always calques from other languages) follow this pattern. An example is mihjákaja, the word for Akiatu spirit mediums or shamans (I haven't settled on a canonical translation). Morpheme-by-morpheme this is drinkspirit, the second element kaja deriving from kwaja spirit being reduced as it would be for partial reduplication and then attracting stress to the final syllable of the compound's head.

[akam chinjir]

Compounds

One update to the last post: it's looking like the complementiser na will be able to take nominal complements, and in that case I think it (like ki) will be a proclitic. That's to say, for example, Itamu the spear will be itamu na=apatu rather than itamu=na apatu.

Here, I'll talk here about the synchronic system. Obviously there'll be older compounds that were formed according to different rules, and those'll have been subject to sound changes as individual words; in a lot of cases, those should probably now be considered monomorphemic. (Anyway I haven't got the diachrony worked out to the point where I can reasonably talk about such things.)

So in the compounds I'll be talking about, the segmental adjustments that take place are just the ones I discussed two posts back. These mostly concern cases where vowel hiatus must be eliminated, though compounding can also give rise to u+j sequences, which will always become ij.

I'll go through the various sorts of compound nouns and compound verbs, then say something about compound adverbs.

Head-final compound nouns

This is be the most common sort of compound. They're not too surprising.

In Akiatu, most modifiers follow the head noun. The exception is modifiers that are themselves noun. Thus, the noun tamwi wood, tree can modify cacija baby, and the resulting expression denotes wooden babies. (By contrast, you might describe a newborn as cacija mwimu, putting the adjective after the noun.) What this means is that regular word order provides a natural source for head-final N+N compounds. tamwi cacija wooden baby is not a compound, it's just a regular phrase; but aiku-cacija leaf-baby is (it refers to a particular sort of ritual object).

The path from a phrase that includes a modifier to a genuine compound might go through a number of stages. Hiatus will be resolved by glide insertion, where previously perhaps a glottal stop was possible; you'll consistently get u→i/_j. Later, glide insertion will be replaced with the various other strategies for resolving hiatus: vowel deletion, diphthongisation, and glide formation. The last step is when the compounds unite to form a single domain for stress assignment, a single phonological word.

(The examples I've given before didn't require any segmental adjustments, but you can see the stress difference---and the corresponding difference in footing---between (ˈta.mwi) ca(ˈci.ja) and (ˌai)(ˌku-ca)(ˈci.ja), in which the heavy syllable results in a minor stress clash.)

Semantically, these compounds are more free to take on idiomatic or noncompositional meanings than are phrases with noun modifiers, just as you might expect. A tamwi cacija really is something wooden made to resemble a baby: a doll. A aiku-cacija, on the other hand, relates to babies more as a matter of ritual pretence than of any actual resemblance.

Nested compounds are in principle possible, but their diachronic source will always be a structure in which an earlier compound is used to modify another noun. I don't have a good example, but you could imagine, say aiku-cacija papijawi leaf baby dance/ritual giving rise to such a thing. Though: I suspect there'll be some resistance to forming phonological words with so many syllables.

There's a complication. Verbs---or any way words that are most often used as verbs---can also be used as prenominal modifiers. In this use they are (at least) semantically nominalised. Thus, papija kwai dance place not a place that dances (that would be kwai na papija, with a relative clause), but a place for dancing. These structures can also give rise to compounds.

One detail: many verbs are formed with (old and unproductive) affixes -tu, -su, and -ru, and these affixes are normally dropped to form compounds.

In fact the affixes used to form deverbal nouns could be treated instead as nouns that regularly head compounds. kwai place is one example, another is nai/naki person, which forms compounds referring to people characterised by the activity or state denoted by the verbal modifier. (nai is the usual form, but naki is preferred when the modifier ends in a heavy syllable.) For example, akjanai stranger, enemy relates to akjasu to pass by, and jakwanai ancestor relates to jakwaru to die.

Coordinate compound nouns

These combine two nouns without subordinating one to the other. Here are some important kinds of example:

• Full reduplication creates a generic noun. For example, janaki-janaki person-person is something like people in general, humankind. (Like these English expressions but unlike all people, use of such a compound does not imply strict universal quantification.)
• Synonym and near-synonym compounds have a similar sense. For example, cucu-cacija child-baby is young people, the young.
• Other pairs of words can be used to pick out a larger class that contains both, still normally referring to them generically. For example, jisaka-sahi fish-yam is food. Conceivably this class could include antonym compounds, but I don't have any examples yet.
• By extension, some coordinate compounds have a purely idiomatic sense. For example, there's itai-taiwa rope-roof, which refers to social and familial bonds. (A translation like "rope and roof" might be more illuminating here. And it might help to know that the more permanent Akiatu dwellings consist of a roof held up by posts, the structure maintained by copious amounts of rope; the model here is the Samoan fale.)

In these compounds, each component maintains its own stress. I'm not sure either component will reliably be more prominent, prosodically speaking.

Complications are possible when the second component begins with a vowel, because such a vowel will merge with the final syllable of the first component. The resulting syllable will receive stress just in case either of the merging syllables independently received stress; if it receives both primary and secondary stress, it will be pronounced with primary stress.

One thing this means is that when compounding of this sort results in a ai or au sequence, often the resulting diphthong will be unstressed, and thus pronounced [ɛ] or [ʊ]. An example is ikwaka-ijaisa giants and bats → strange bedfellows, which becomes iˈkwa.k[ɛ]ˈsai.sa.

I kind of want to allow adjective+adjective compounding to also produce nouns, in at least some cases, but there aren't many obvious candidates among Akiatu's few adjectives. Possibly there will eventually be some synonym or antonym compounds involving siwi small, young, subtle, nimble, hatau big, important, imposing, ukja short, low, lowly, and ahwita tall, high, honoured.

Other compound nouns

All other compound nouns have their first component as their phonological/prosodic head. This ends up having major consequences.

The thing is, primary stress falls on the head's ult or penult; there's provision for assigning a secondary stress to the left of this, but not to its right. This means that when the primary stress falls on the first component of a compound, the second component won't receive stress at all. And that means that the second component ends up being phonologically and prosodically indistinguishable from a clitic. (So sometimes I'll call these clitic compounds.)

There's an important corollary. In a (phonologically) head-initial compound, the second component will be reduced just as it would be for partial reduplication. That's to say, the second component will always have a CVCV skeleton, which is filled with segments from the base's right edge, skipping medial glides in syllables with complex onsets, and inserting a default consonant if necessary, which it will be if one of the base's two final syllables is heavy; the default consonant will be k before k or a and t before i. (The last point is a minor change from the post on partial reduplication.)

One final consequence of this: as happens with bisyllabic clitics, primary stress will always be attracted to the final syllable of the first component.

Let me walk through an example.

The main word for ocean derives from the noun phrase mikuwi hatau great waters. This being a noun phrase, the resulting compound had the noun---namely mikuwi---as its head. hatau then would receive no stress, and must become a clitic; the way it does that is to reduce. Filling the CVCV skeleton from the right of hatau yields ha_u, with a blank because there is no consonant between the a and the u. This is filled with a default consonant, which here will be k because of the following u. This yields haku. It will attract stress onto the preceding syllable, and the result will be mikuwí-haku ocean.

mikuwí-haku is an example of a N+Adj compound. These will always have the adjectives in a reduced form. (Remember that adjectives follow the head noun in Akiatu.) Sometimes the reduction will be trivial---siwi will just be siwi---but not always. Two adjectives actually get collapsed: sakija red, bright, shining and ukja short, low, lowly both become kija. (I guess I can live with that.)

The other compounds that works this way are exocentric V+O compounds. These will probably all be calques. The one example I have so far (which I mentioned last time) is mihjá-kaja drink-spirit (with kaja ← kwaja spirit). This is the main word for the religious specialists I've compared to shamans.

Head-final compound verbs

These are OV sequences that have gotten lexicalised. Phonologically and prosodically, these will work the same way as head-final noun compounds.

To be honest, I'm not sure how common these will be, and I don't have any examples. (Of course there'll be OV idioms, I just don't know how many, if any, will end up becoming true compounds.)

Coordinate verb compounds

These again will work more or less the same as the corresponding noun compounds, though of course without the same generic sense. The one example I can remember is itijau-waku push-pull → stretch (both components and the resulting verb are transitive). Note that because both components receive stress, this can't be confused for a construction with a resultative complement.

Adverbs

I think I've mentioned that manner adverbs---as opposed to adverbial phrases---aren't that common, and that the main way to form them is by full reduplication of a verb. Well, I suppose that could be counted as a form of compounding, so I'll mention it here. It'll be a sort of coordinate compound, naturally, so both copies will receive stress.

Maybe I should let other sorts of V+V compound have an adverbial sense, too; I'll have to play around. (Regardless if I do that, V+V compounds could still go in an adverbial clause.)

[akam chinjir]

Telicity, aspect, applicatives, focus...

I've been trying to mull through some things, and I figure I'll post about some of it, even though it's pretty inconclusive, and even though I'm probably still misunderstanding most of this stuff. (I'll still do my best to sound like I know what I'm talking about, though.)

Fair warning: when I started seriously plotting out this post, I wondered I might be best off just writing a full-length article, and maybe seeing if Fiat Lingua would be interested. It's long. But telicity, aspect, and focus are interesting, and intersect in interesting ways, and I hope this post is able to inherit some of that interest.

Telicity and objects

As I discussed a few posts back, a resultative complement renders a predicate telic:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ʔɪˈtɐi̯ ˌhwi.səˈjɐː.tɪ.mə
kipaja itai hwisaja=tima      
Kipaja rope braid  =ready(PFV)
"Kipaja made the rope"

The activity of itai hwisaja=tima preparing the rope has a built-in end-point: it's done when the rope is all prepared. And this is grammatically important here, since it's precisely the telicity of itai hwisaja=tima that ends up making the clause perfective.

But there's a trick here. For this to work, though, the object has to pick out a set amount of rope. Accordingly, preparing the rope and preparing two ropes are both telic, but preparing ropes and preparing rope are not (on their most natural interpretations, at least). So the telicity of the verb phrase places constraints on how we interpret the object. (And this is why I translated itai as "the rope" above: to ensure a telic interpretation.)

In fact what telicity requires is a specific object. (I got this part wrong last time.) So you can do it with an indefinite object that's not numerically quantified so long as it's marked specific. In Akiatu you can do that with the "number" itu:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ʔɪˈtɐi̯ ˈjiː.tʊ ˌhwi.səˈjɐː.tɪ.mə
kipaja itai itu   hwisaja=tima      
Kipaja rope INDEF braid  =ready(PFV)
"Kipaja made some (a certain amount of) rope"

(itu is the counting number one, but in this use it just indicates indefiniteness and specificity, not number. In English "a certain" can be used to indicate these things, but it doesn't really sound right here.)

Here's somehing new (or maybe something old that's coming back): the object only shifts before the verb if it's contributing to telicity in this sort of way. So in a non-telic variant of the sentences above, the object stays after the verb:

kɪˈpɐj.jə hwiˈsɐj.jə jɪˈtɐi̯
kipaja hwisaja itai
Kipaja braid   rope
"Kipaja is making rope"

A telic expression actually allows a division of labour, with just the quantifying portion of the object phrase moving before the verb:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ˈiː.tʊ ˌhwi.səˈjɐː.tɪ.mə jɪˈtɐi̯
kipaja itu  hwisaja=tima       itai
Kipaja some braid  =ready(PFV) rope
"Kipaja is making some rope"

Perfectivity

Resultative complements indicate not just telicity, but also perfectivity, as you can see from my glosses above.

There's an obvious connection between the two things. A telic expression indicates an end or goal to which the reported event aims, so that when that goal is achieved the event is finished. This imposes a sequence, with an activity followed by a result. And one of the main things that the perfective aspect does is fit events into sequences.

(An overbroad generalisation, which I'll come back to: if you say P and Q, and your verbs are perfective, then probably you mean P and then Q; but if your verbs are imperfective, you're probably thinking of P and Q as simultaneous.)

The fact that telicity gets interpreted as perfectivity means that if you say, for example, kipaja itai hwisaja=tima Kipaja made the rope, you're saying not only that Kipaja's activity would end if he finished the rope, you're also saying that he did in fact finish, and it would be a contradiction if you continued by saying mata kja hwisaja=kú=tima but he couldn't finish making it.

But the perfectivity implied by a telic verb phrase can be canceled, in two ways. First, an imperfective auxiliary higher in the clause can override it:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ɪˈjɐu̯ ʔɪˈtɐi̯ ˌhwi.səˈjɐː.tɪ.mə
kipaja ijau      itai hwisaja=tima      
Kipaja sit(PROG) rope braid  =ready(PFV)
"Kipaja is making the rope"

The verb is still telic, but the sentence no longer entails that the indicated end or goal has been achieved: if you went on to say mata kja hwisaja=kú=tima but he can't finish making it, you might be canceling an implicature but you wouldn't be contradicting yourself.

Second, a nonfinite clause cannot be marked as either perfective or imperfective. It might still include a resultative complement, perhaps for its lexical content, and the resultative complement will still indicate telicity and place constraints on the object. But as with the progressive auxiliary ijau, you'll no longer have the implication that the goal is reached. For example, with the nonfinite complementiser na:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ ʔʊˈciː.sʊ nə.kɪˈpɐj.jə.kɪ ʔɪˈtɐi̯ ˌhwi.səˈjɐː.tɪ.mə
itamu ucisu na  =kipaja=ki  itai hwisaja=tima 
Itamu want  COMP=Kipaja=DET rope braid  =ready
"Itamu wants Kipaja to make the rope"

You might infer that Itamu wants Kipaja to finish the rope, but this doesn't actually say that. (To say that you'd need the finite complementiser kja: itamu icisu kja=kipaja itai hwisaja=tima.)

A couple more things here.

First, there are a few post-verbal particles that imply completion or termination or anyway perfectivity without implying telicity. One is frustrative =kú, which I snuck in above; there is also mai, which can be used to indicate that a state or activity is temporally bounded:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ sʊˈwaː.sʊ mɐi̯
itamu suwasu mai
Itamu sleep  PFV
"Itamu slept"

Second, an imperfective clause will most often simply lack a resultative complement, and won't need ijau. This implies that the verb phrase will be nontelic, and therefore that any object will come after the verb:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ ʔʊˈtiː.kə ˌjɐi̯ˈkɐː.tɪ
itamu utika jaikati
Itamu hunt  slaver 
"Itamu is hunting slavers"

If you want, you can take this as an indication that Akiatu treats imperfectives as somehow less transitive than perfectives, a pattern maybe also found in some split ergative languages and presumably elsewhere. Regardless, it's a big revision to the grammar: a lot of previous example sentences have just become ungrammatical.

(And also, I guess you now have to say that Akiatu is basically SVO in imperfective clauses and SOV in perfective clauses. If you believe in basic word orders, that is.)

Intransitives

Of course you'll want to be able to mark intransitive clauses as perfective. How can you do that?

This isn't so tricky with unaccusatives, if as is standard you think of the theme argument of an unaccusative as (underlyingly) an object rather than a subject. You just treat that argument the same way you treat the direct object of a transitive verb, but then allow that argument to move into the slot for the syntactic subject. So you might get this:

ˈtɐː.mwɪ ˌhɐ.kjəˈruː.hə.jə
tamwi hakjaru=haja     
wood  burn   =away(PFV)
The wood burned away

(Here the definiteness of tamwi wood is required not just for the telicity of the verb phrase but also because Akiatu subjects must be definite.)

With unergatives, there are a few possibilities. One is to use a postverbal particle such as mai, mentioned above (and see the example with suwasu mai slept). Another is to use a dummy or cognate object of some sort. And really I should probably give punctive verbs a distinctive treatment somehow. But I won't be dealing further with any of that in this post.

Ditransitives

Okay, here's a basic ditransitive:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ʔɪˈtɐi̯ hwəˈtiː.mə.wə jɪˈtɐː.mʊ
kipaja itai hwati=mawa      i   itamu
Kipaja rope give =find(PFV) DAT Itamu
"Kipaja gave the rope to Itamu"

This is perfective because its verb phrase is telic, but notice an asymmetry: the direct object itai rope is but the goal argument i itamu to Itamu is not implicated in its telicity. The semantics of the resultative complement =mawa find are a bit tricky, but it takes itai rope as its theme, and the verb phrase's telicity requires itai to get a definite interpretation and to move before the verb. i itamu, the goal argument, is peripheral to all that.

But Akiatu has dative shift, so we can do this instead:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ʔɪˈtɐː.mʊ hwəˈtiː.hə.tʊ wɪˈtɐi̯
kipaja itamu hwati=hatu        itai
Kipaja itamu give =arrive(PFV) rope
"Kipaja gave Itamu a/the spear"

Here it is itamu that goes before the verb and helps render the verb phrase telic. And the resultative complement can no longer be mawa find---since it wouldn't make sense for itamu to be that verb's theme here---so it changes to hatu arrive. The idea is that the giving of the rope to Itamu is finished when the spear actually arrives at Itamu.

Notice that this alternation gives us two ways of thinking about the same event. Either it's an event of giving-to-Itamu that's finished when all of the rope has been affected; or it's an event of giving-of-rope that's finished when the rope has made its way to Itamu. That's to say that the two different structures involve two different ways of measuring out the event, and thus two different ways of thinking about when it's over.

Applicatives

So an applicative takes an argument that you would normally think of as an oblique and somehow makes it a core argument. English dative shift is widely thought to be an example: it takes a recipient or beneficiary argument, marked with dative "to," and turns it into a direct object.

English dative shift doesn't require any overt morphology on the verb, so you might not want to call it an applicative. If so, I hope you'll forgive me here, because when I talk about applicatives in Akiatu, they also get no morphological marking.

Some background: I always planned for Akiatu to have no applicatives, and the reason was that I knew if I gave it one applicative I'd want to give it eight of them (or something). Instead I gave it something I called argument raising. Suffice it to say, the only way I can now think to make syntactic sense of this argument raising is to treat it as a kind of applicative. (But I don't know how to salvage the whole thing. In particular, many raised arguments were supposed to still be preposition phrases, and as far as I can tell that's unsalvageable.)

So, applicatives. I actually don't yet understand them nearly well enough to go into any detail, so I'm just going to give a few examples that intersect in fun ways with telicity, and hope that I can eventually make sense of them. I have some hope: the applicatives in Kinyarwanda at least seem to have all the features I'm thinking of. But we'll see.

Here's an example of a locative applicative:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ ˌʔɐi̯.jɪˈkiː ˌʔu.tɪˈkɐː.wɪ.kə ˌjɐi̯ˈkɐ.tɪ
itamu aijiki utika=wika jaikati
Itamu island hunt =tidy slaver 
"Itamu hunted the island for slavers."

The locative argument doesn't appear in its usual place after the verb, and it doesn't require the locative preposition a: it's been applied, as one says. Meanwhile, the theme---the underlying internal argument---remains after the verb. So far, that's just the same as in the example before of dative shift, except with a location rather than a recipient.

Now look at the resultative complement. wika (< awika be clean, tidy) has the applied argument aijiki island as its theme: it's the island, not the hunters, that end up clean and tidy. The hunters end up dead; and if you wanted a non-applicative variant of the sentence, you'd need to change the resultative complement: maybe itamu jaikati utika=jaka a aijiki Itamu hunted the slavers on the island dead, with the resultative complement jaka (< jakwa be dead).

The two sentences also differ in what they imply about the end or goal of Itamu's hunting. According to the applicative example, she'll be done when she's hunted all over the island and eliminated any slavers there. According to the non-applicative variant, she'll be done when all the slavers are dead, whether or not they're on the island. Notably, the applicative variant does not strictly entail that there are any hunters to begin with, though the non-applicative variant does entail this.

Okay, that's a second example that also works pretty well in English. (Maybe you didn't realise you could do so many applicatives in English.) Here's a couple of things you can't do in English.

First, you can use an applicative construction to raise a beneficiary (or maleficiary) argument that's not a recipient:

ˈhjɐː.cɪ ʔɪˈtɐː.mʊ ˌʔa.cəˈtɐu̯.rə.wʊ həˈkjɐw.wɪ
hjaci itamu acatau=rawu           hakjawi
Hjaci Itamu bless =satisfied(PFV) bonfire
"Hjaci blessed the bonfire for Itamu"

(Maybe some English-speakers would accept "Hjaci blessed Itamu the bonfire"?)

Remember that the applied object together with the resultative complement has to indicate the end or goal of the described action. The sentence indicates that Hjaci blessed the fire, and was done when Itamu was satisfied. Or, to be a bit more abstract about it, she was done when Itamu could truly be said to be the beneficiary of her action.

Second, you can be really tricksy and use an applicative with an unaccusative verb.

I want to sneak up on this one a bit. As I indicated before, I make the common assumption that the surface subject of an unaccusative verb is (semantically and underlyingly) an object; to use some lingo, it's an internal rather than an external argument. It ends up as subject, in languages where that's what happens, because the clause needs a subject, and it's the only candidate. (Well, at least in English there are contexts in which you can get an expletive subject instead.)

(For those learned about these things, it's important to how I'm thinking about these things that I assume an indirect object gets merged as the complement of the verb, a direct object as a specifier, so in the normal case the direct object is higher than the indirect object.)

Now, as we've seen, with an applicative, the applied object generally ends up higher than the underlying object. Just to take the last example, the verb phrase and its edge just amounted to itamu acatau=rawu hakjawi, with applied object itamu higher (that is, lefter) than direct object hakjawi fire. And there's no reason why this configuration should be different if the verb were unaccusative. So if it were unaccusative, which of those objects is going to end up as subject?

Here's what you get:

ˌa.kɪˌja.tʊˈnɐi̯ ˌjɐ.kwəˈruː.mə.wə ɪˈtɐː.mʊ
akijatunai    jakwaru=mawa      itamu
Akiatu.people die    =find(PFV) itamu
"Itamu died for the Akiatu people"

That's right, the applied object ends up as the subject.

My choice of resultative complement here, mawa find might seem strange. That's partly because it's got odd semantics as a resultative complement. It's meant to imply, roughly, that the Akiatu people came into existence as a people as a result of Itamu's death. Hopefully it makes sense?

Another possibility that would make a lot of sense would be to come up with a resultative complement meaning something like be better off. Then that could be used fairly consistently with applied beneficiaries. Anyway, it's an appealing grammaticalisation path.

Focus and perfectivity

Actually what I want to say about focus is almost entirely negative. There are a bunch of different things that get talked about in terms of focus. Mostly they have to do with highlighting some element of a sentence for some reason or another. But languages highlight a bunch of different things for a bunch of different things, and it's confusing---anyway it confused me for a long time---to try to think of them all as reflecting a single phenomenon, namely focus.

A big part of the problem is that I somewhere picked up the idea that focus had to be about new information. You'd think that after the nth time I read about a language using topicalisation to express contrastive focus, I might have figured something out. And if not that, then the widespread tendency to focus question words should have clued me in---question words don't convey information at all, much less new information, at least not about the topic of conversation. But I didn't get clued in, I just got confused.

Here's one relevant thing I didn't realise until very recently. Language after language uses different constructions (especially clefts and other sorts of fronting) to express contrast or (especially) exhaustivity, but I'm now under the impression that languages rarely if ever use the same means just to flag new information (instead they'll use intonation and maybe particles).

So once upon a time I thought of the position right before the verb as a place where you could put one of its arguments for purposes of focus. Now instead that's a place where an argument goes if it plays a particular role in making the verb phrase telic. I don't know how well I've explained it, but putting an argument there actually has a very specific significance. So you can say, sort of vaguely, that a preverbal object is focused; but now I think I can unpack what that means in fairly specific terms---and without worrying that it doesn't have anything to do with contrast, or with the focus particle =su. (A bonus is that if I ever figure out prosody, the preverbal argument is likely going to end up intonationally highlighted too---but at that point I'll presumably be able to tell a fairly concrete story as to why and how it's highlighted.)

Anyway, all this pleases me.

There's also a (somewhat free-associative) connection back to perfectivity. Most often, a the verb phrase in an imperfective clause won't have a resultative complement, and therefore won't be telic, and therefore won't license a preverbal argument, and therefore won't (ahem) focus its object.

Now, you might take this to reflect a more general tendency for imperfective clauses to be sort of backgrounded. To revisit an idea from earlier, if you say P and Q, and P is imperfective but Q is perfective, then most likely P provides the background against which Q took place, and it's very likely that the next sentence will go on to tell you what happened after Q.

But even more: regardless of how exactly you want to explain how perfective and imperfective differ in terms of temporal perspective---dewrad quoted Comrie's well-known words about this just yesterday---all of that can be overridden in the interests of discursively-appropriate foregrounding or backgrounding. You can put imperfectives in sequence: "I was reading, and then I was watching tv, and then I was sleeping." Or set a scene using only perfectives: "lightning flashed and thunder banged as the wind howled." This has a lot less to do with viewpoint aspect, as that's usually understood, then with focus.

...but I guess that's enough of a digreession, and enough of a post. I hope something in there made sense

[cedh]

I hope something in there made sense

Yes, it did!

I hadn't looked at this thread before, but I must say I really missed out on that; I'll have to go back and read your earlier posts too. This last one is really well-thought-out and well-written. I especially love how you use a combination of telicity, "focus", and resultative complements to grammaticalize applicatives. Thumbs up!

[akam chinjir]

Hey, thanks!

[akam chinjir]

...I don't know if anyone here would be interested, but I put something up over at u/conlangs (specifically here) based on that last post as well as the recent one on resultative complements. The most significant difference from what I posted here, I think, is that I started from the assumption that a resultative complement has to take a theme argument; it can either share that argument with the main verb (the normal case) or add a new one (which leads to the patterns I was thinking of in terms of applicatives).

Thinking of it that way, one of the examples in the last post was an error:

kɪˈpɐj.jə ʔɪˈtɐː.mʊ hwəˈtiː.hə.tʊ wɪˈtɐi̯
kipaja itamu hwati=hatu itai
Kipaja itamu give =arrive(PFV) rope
"Kipaja gave Itamu a/the spear"

This can't be right because itamu would have to be the goal argument, not the theme, of hatu arrive.

[akam chinjir]

Questions

I've got planned several follow-ups to the telicity post, but I still need to do quite a bit of reading before I can finish any of them. So, for the sake of having something up, here's the current state of questions. Do I have to mention that the post is ridiculously long?

Some context

It's very common in Akiatu for an adverbial or functional element to have its meaning made more concrete by whatever appears immediately to its left.

A case in point is the determiner ki, when its used to indicate alienable possession:

ɪˈtɐː.mʊ.kɪ əˈpɐ.tʊ
itamu=ki  apatu
Itamu=DET spear
"Itamu's spear"

The ki tells you that apatu refers definitely, and the mention of an explicit possessor lets you resolve that definite reference.

For what it's worth, as I understand the syntax, itamu goes in the determiner's specifier, and the pattern I'm talking about is one in which an adverbial or functional element attracts something to its specifier. But if you don't like that way of thinking about things, you can just take it to be a slightly awkward manner of speaking.

ki does not require that its specifier be filled, at least with anything overt: ki=apatu on its own could mean the spear or her spear (etc). There's a phonological difference that I've indicated by showing the clitic junctures in the two examples: ki will cliticise onto anything in its specifier, but if there's nothing there, it'll cliticise onto the following noun.

There's quite a range of other particles that work in similar ways, including the other complementisers (kja, mwi, and na) and certain adverbs you might think of as focus-sensitive (like cai also, too, wija even; though these are not clitics). But for the remainder of this post I'll be talking about the irrealis marker sai.

A phonological detail: when sai occurs as a clitic, and therefore does not receive stress, its vowel must be reduced, and what you end up with is something like sɛ.

Polar questions

Here's an example of a polar question:

ˈiː.tɪ.sɛ ˈmiː.kwə ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
iti=sai mikwa   piwa=mi
AFF=IRR already eat =PFV
"Have you eaten?"

(Er, one of the things I have to follow up on is the syntax of verbs of ingestion, especially piwa; I've reversed a longstanding view and decided they are ambitransitive, sort of.)

Here, spec-sai is filled with the affirmative polarity particle iti. This tells you that what's being questioned is the truth of the whole ensuing sentence.

There are other possibilities, including a negative polarity particle:

ˈmiː.wə.sɛ ˈmiː.kwə ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
miwa=sai mikwa   piwa=mi
NEG =IRR already eat =PFV
"Haven't you eaten?"

(You always get the stative negator miwa, not nonstative hwi, regardless of what you might think of the aspect of the embedded clause.)

Another possibility here is to focus the temporal adverb mikwa already:

ˈmiː.kwə.sɛ ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
mikwa  =sai piwa=mi
already=IRR eat =PFV
"Have you eaten?"

You can also specifically question an argument of the verb:

jɪˈsɐː.kə.sɛ ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
jisaka=sai piwa=mi
fish  =IRR eat =PFV
"Did you eat fish?"

Something tangential I should explain: so far in these examples I'm using the nontelic perfective marker mi; the last example corresponds to the affirmative sentence piwa=mi jisaka '(you) ate fish', with the nontelic object after the verb. If you were asking about some particular fish, you could instead ask jisaka=sai piwa=haja did you eat (away) the fish, with the resultative complement haja indicating both perfectivity and telicity.

I'm inclined to say that the verb cannot be fronted in polar questions. But the aspect-marking auxiliaries wicu lie down, ijau sit, and aki stand can:

ˈɐː.kɪ.sɛ ˈpiː.wə
aki       =sai piwa
stand(POT)=IRR eat
"Are you ready to eat?"

The perlocative adverb/preverb/particle capi shows up in some idiomatic questions:

ˈcɐ.pɪ.sɛ ˈjai̯, ˈsɐ.mə
capi    =sai jai sama
that.way=IRR do  2s
"Are you doing that?"

(I'll come back to that sentence-final pronoun, below; though I'm leaving it out of most of the examples, it's common in questions, and it would be weird to leave it out here.)

sai will precede the subject, but follow any wai-marked topic:

əˈpɐː.tʊ.wɛ ˈmiː.kwə.sɛ kɪˈpɐː.jə hwəˈtiː.mə.wə jɪˈtɐː.mʊ
apatu=wai mikwa=sai kipaja hwati=mawa i=itamu?
"The spear, has Kipaja given it to Itamu?"

Content questions

Content questions work in essentially the same way, except that the fronted expression will include a question word, like this:

ˈcɐu̯.sɛ ˈpiː.wə
cau=sai piwa
what=IRR eat
"What are you eating?"

I'll risk giving the current list of content question words:

Full form	Intensified	Reduced form	Alternatives	Meaning
najai tí cau waika tiwani kakutai sai titi hu cau cau kasu titi... cijai	najawi tiwi tiwi waikawi titiwi hu tiwi tiwi kasu titiwi... cijai	nai ti cu kaku	cau=wati cu=kwai cu=ani niwa cau aku hu cau cau... cijai cau... cijai	who? what? (animate) what? (inanimate) where? when? how much? to what extent? how much? how many? how? why? because of what? why? for what purpose? doing what?

(I've given earlier versions of these before, but the results always seemed too systematic; but this hasn't changed in a long time, so maybe I'll stay happy with it.)

Intensified forms

The intensified forms in .-wi. have something of the force of English "on earth":

tɪˈtiː.wɪ.sɛ cɪˈjɐi̯, ˈsɐː.mə
titi-wi =sai cijai   sama
what-INT=IRR do.what 2s
"What on earth are you doing?"

najai, tiwi, cau; nai, ti, cu

These differ in the expected animacy of the answer, najai for human beings, tiwi for other animates, and cau for inanimates. The class of animates is a bit bigger than you might expect, and includes what you might think of as forces of nature, including fire, water, and wind. Grammatically, at least, the ancestors are also considered animate but nonhuman.

najai, tiwi, and cau can be used either on their own or with a noun complement; in the latter case, they're discourse-linked (like English "which"):

ˈcɐu̯.sɛ ˌɐ.mʊˈwiː.jə.kʊ
cau =sai amuwi=jaku
what=IRR use  =PFV
"Whad did you use?"

ˈcɐu̯ əˈpɐː.tʊ.sɛ ˌɐ.mʊˈwiː.jə.kʊ
cau  apatu=sai amuwi=jaku
what spear=IRR use  =PFV
"Which spear did you use?"

The reduced forms are also used with nouns, but the resulting question is not discourse-linked:

cʊ.əˈpɐː.tʊ.sɛ ˌɐ.mʊˈwiː.jə.kʊ
cu  =apatu=sai amuwi=jaku
what=spear=IRR use  =PFV
"What spear did you use?"

(But these reduced forms are more often used as indefinite in nonspecific determiners, not in questions.)

waika, tiwani; cu=kwai, cu=ani; cau=wati

There are various ways to ask where or when. cu=kwai and cu=ani are close to at what place and at what time, on what occasion, respectively. The difference from waika where and tiwani when is a bit subtle: the former a bit suggest an ontology of distinct places or times, and the latter do not. cau=wati allows a broader range of uses than either of the other where words, with uses in which it might be translated as in what respect, compared to what, by what standard, and even when.

Note that by regular phonological process, cu=ani ends up as cani. Also, a minor curiosity, this is sort of the same word as tiwani. In the ancestral language Gagur, tiu compounded with ani to yield tiuani, giving Akiatu tiwani; whereas tiu on its own resulted in cu, while ani didn't change significancly.

kakutai, kaku, sai

With kakutai how much, you use the reduced form kaku whenever it occurs with a noun. Often two constructions are possible:

ˌkɐ.kʊˈtɐi̯.sɛ ˈpiː.wə.mɪ jɪˈsɐː.kə
kakutai =sai piwa=mi  jisaka
how.much=IRR eat =PFV fish
"How much fish did you eat?"

kə.kʊ.jɪˈsɐː.kə.sɛ ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
kaku    =jisaka=sai piwa=mi
how.much=fish  =IRR eat =PFV
"How much fish did you eat"

It's important that these question the patient of the verb; when questioning any other sort of argument, only kaku is possible:

kə.kʊ.jəˈnɐː.kɪ.sɛ ˌʔɐ.nɪˈcuː.tə pɪˈwɐː.hə.jə
kaku    =janaki=sai anicuta piwa=haja
how.many=person=IRR boar    eat =away(PFV)
"How many people ate the boar?"

ˌkɐ.kʊˈtɐi̯ jəˈnɐː.kɪ ˌʔɐ.nɪˈcuː.tə pɪˈwɐː.hə.jə
kakutai =sai janaki anicuta piwa=haja
how.many=IRR people board   eat =away(PFV)
"How many boars did the people eat? (NOT: how many people ate the boar?)"

The question word sai how many, how much always gets full stress, unlike the question particle sai: they should be easy to distinguish. The question word sai has the syntax of a number from one to five, and generally expects a small number or amount as answer:

jɪˈsɐː.kə ˈsɐi̯.sɛ ˈpiː.wə.mɪ
jisaka sai     =sai piwa=mi
fish   how.many=IRR eat =PFV
"How many fish did you eat?"

You can plug sai into higher numbers if the answer is expected to be higher. Numbers from five to ten are haku itu five one, haku ami five two, and so on, so you can get this:

jəˈnɐː.kɪ ˈhɐː.kʊ ˈsɐi̯.sɛ ˈsuː.wɪ
janaki haku sai     =sai suwi
person five how.many=IRR here
"Five and how many people are here?"

If you want to ask how many fives, you use hakuwi sai; and you can use haratiwi sai for how many twenties.

sai does not strictly require, or even anticipate, a numerical answer:

ˈmiː.kʊ ˈsɐi̯.sɛ ʊˈciː.sʊ
miku  sai     =sai ucisu
water how.much=IRR want
"How much water do you want?"

There's still an implication that the amount in question is small.

cijai

There's a question verb, cijai do what---but since verbs can't get fronted it'll normally occur with an additional quesion word, usually cau what or titi how.

tɪˈtiː.wɪ.sɛ cɪˈjɐi̯, ˈsɐː.mə
titi-wi =sai cijai   sama
how -INT=IRR do.what 2s
"What on earth are you doing?"

Why?

Akiatu has only periphrastic constructions for asking after causes, motives, and goals. Generally speaking you use an ablative construction to ask after causes or motives:

(ˈɐ.kʊ) hʊˈcɐu̯.sɛ ˈkɐ.wə ˈhjɐː ʔɪˌmɪ.kʊˈwiː.hə.tʊ
(aku)     hu =cau =sai kawa hjá  i  =mikuwíhatu
(be.born) ABL=what=IRR go   COMP DAT=ocean
"Why did you go to the ocean?"

The aku be born is optional; it'll show up more often in questions about past events, though it's probably also true that questions about future plans will ask more often about goals, rather than causes.

To question purposes or goals, you can use kasu follow or cijai do what.

ˈcɐu̯ ˈkɐː.sʊ.sɛ ˈkɐː.wə ʔɪˌmi.kʊˈwiː.hə.tʊ
cau  kasu  =sai kawa i  =mikuwíhatu
what follow=IRR go   DAT=ocean
"Why are you going to the ocean?"

In situ question words

Fronting the question word is common, but it's not obligatory; you can also leave the question word in place---in which case you must omit the initial sai

ˈpiː.wə ˈcɐu̯, ˈsɐː.mə
piwa cau, sama
eat  what 2s
"What are you eating?"

This doesn't have to be an echo question; it's a bit more abrupt and maybe a bit more casual than the form with sai, but it's a regular question nonetheless.

There's a restriction, though: you can't question the subject in situ, presumably because of the ban on indefinite subjects.

If you've got multiple question words, at least one of them must stay in situ:

nəˈjɐi̯.sə ˈpiː.wə ˈcɐu̯
najai=sai piwa cau
who  =IRR eat  what
"Who is eating what?"

As you might expect from the translation, this requests a list of pairs as an answer: Itamu is eating fish, Hjaci is eating yams, and so on.

You can also have more than one question word in situ:

kɪˈpɐː.jə nəˈjɐi̯ hwəˈtiː.rə.wʊ nɪ.wəˈcɐu̯
kipaja najai hwati=rawu           niwa=cau
Kipaja who   give =satisfied(PFV) INST=what
"What did Kipaja give to whom?"

The translation here is subtly wrong, for this question does not ask for a list of pairs. You might ask it if you saw Kipaja giving something to someone, but could make out neither the item nor the recipient.

(Aside: I don't remember details, but if I remember at all right, it's a robust cross-linguistic generalisation that when there are multiple content question words, you get a list interpretation if at least one of them is fronted, but not if all remain in situ.)

Extraction and pied piping

Full disclosure: I don't understand either Akiatu syntax or island constraints (and so on) well enough to tell you the full truth here.

Subjects and objects can be questioned without trouble. One consequence: in questions, though only in questions, the subject of a sentence can be indefinite:

nəˈjɐi̯.sɛ wəˈtiː.wɪ
najai=sai watiwi
who  =IRR there
"Who's there?"

To question an indirect object, one possibility is to use a resultative construction that puts the indirect object before the verb. Here's an example:

nəˈjɐi̯.sɛ kɪˈpɐː.jə hwəˈtiː.rə.wʊ nɪ.wɪˈtɐi̯
najai=sai kipaja hwati=rawu           niwa=itai
who  =IRR kipaja give =satisfied(PFV) INST=rope
"Who did Kipaja give rope to?"

Here, the use of a resultative complement let's you know that the sentence is about someone who was satisfied by Kipaja's giving---in other words, a beneficiary or recipient. The result is a lot like what you get with an applicative construction, a point I (over-)emphasised in the post on telicity; so you might say that this questions the indirect object by promoting it to direct object. (The use of the instrumental preposition niwa with the theme is something I'll need to talk about in another post.)

Another possibility is to use an appropriate adverbial question word, here probably cau=wati at what:

ˈcɐu̯.wə.tɪ.sɛ kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈhwɐː.tɪ ˈhjɐː ʔɪˈtɐi̯
cau =wati=sai kipaja hwati hjá  itai
what=LOC =IRR Kipaja give  COMP rope
"To whom (lit. "where") did Kipaja give rope?"

And indirect objects can also be questioned in situ.

Possessors, both alienable and inalienable, can be questioned with just the question word fronted, with the noun phrase as a whole pied piped, or with the question word in situ. Here's an example that questions an alienable possessor:

nəˈjɐi̯.sɛ ʔəˈmuː.wɪ kjəˈpɐː.ʊ, ˈsɐː.wɪ
najai=sai amuwi ki =apatu, sawi
who  =IRR use   DET=spear  1p
"Whose spear shall we use?"

Adjuncts come in a few flavours. Preposition phrases allow adverbial question words, in situ question words, and (except for locative a and dative i) pied piping. Here's an example with a pied piped instrumenal adjunct:

The prepositions niwa INST, sati COM, and hu ABL (but not for some reason locative a and dative i) can be pied piped:

ˈniː.wə ˈcɐu̯ wəˈpɐː.tʊ.sɛ ˌʔi.kʊˈwiː.sʊ ʔəˌjɐi̯ˈkɐː.tı
niwa cau  apatu=sai ikuwisu a  =jaikati, sawi
INST what spear=IRR tickle  LOC=slaver   1p
"With what spear shall we tickle the slaver?"

One thing you can't do is strand a preposition.

Things get dicey if you want to question some element in an adjunct clause. Let's start with this declarative sentence:

kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈtɐː.kɪ jɪˈtɐi̯ ˈjiː.tʊ.mə ˈwɐː.mʊ hjɐː
kipaja taki itai itu  =ma  wamu hjá
Kipaja hold rope INDEF=SUB come COMP
"Kipaja brought some rope"

Notice the use of the subordinate abverbial clause: holding some rope, Kipaja came. How can you ask what Kipaja brought?

An in situ question word is possible:

kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈtɐː.kɪ ˈcɐu̯.mə ˈwɐ.mʊ ˈhjɐː
kipaja taki cau =ma  wamu hjá
Kipaja hold what=SUB come COMP
"What did Kipaja bring?"

You could pied pipe the whole adverbial clause:

ˈtɐː.kɪ ˈcɐu̯.sɛ kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈwɐ.mʊ ˈhjɐː
taki cau =sai kipaja wamu hjá
hold what=IRR Kipaja come COMP
"What did Kipaja bring?"

Conversely, you can sort of flip the whole sentence inside-out, topicalising everything but the subordinate clause:

kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈwɐ.mʊ ˈhjɐː.wɛ, ˈcɐu̯.sɛ ˈtɐː.kɪ
kipaja wamu hjá =wai, cau =sai taki
Kipaja come COMP=TOP  what=IRR hold
"What was Kipaja bringing when he came?"

Another possibility in complex cases is to front just the question word, but leave behind a resumptive pronoun:

ˈcɐu̯.sɛ kɪˈpɐː.jə ˈtɐː.kɪ kɪˈmiː.jə ˈwɐ.mʊ ˈhjɐː
cau =sai kipaja taki kimija=ma  wamu hjá
what=IRR Kipaja hold RESUM =SUB come COMP
"What did Kipaja bring?"

I'm inclined to say that the resumptive strategy will be rare and the topicalisation strategy relatively common.

Coda

That's plenty for now. I'll just acknowledge a few things I haven't talked about.

• questioning elements in complement clauses ("who did she say is coming?"); I've always wanted to allow partial wh movement here, but I'm not sure how it'll work
• embedded questions ("she asked who is coming"; possibly also "she said who is coming," though I might use a relative clause construction for that)
• intonation, which I still don't understand at all (and learning more about it isn't especially high on my list)
• oops, and I forgot to come back to the sentence-final pronouns; another time, I guess