Prep phrases that take direct objects

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janMato
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Prep phrases that take direct objects

Post by janMato »

All of the following patterns have some support in the canon or corpus, they are all on the difficult end of tp concepts and look rather alien at first.

1) n1 li adjective e n2. n1 causes n2 to have the quality of the adjective.
2) n1 li n3 e n2. n2 causes n2 to turn into n3.
3) n1 li tawa n3 e n2. n1 moves n2 to location n3.
4) n1 li lon n3 e n2. n1 fastens or places n2 at location n3.

Today it occurred to me that this pattern could be generalized further if we view prepositional phrases as sort of modifiers.

5) n1 li PP1 PP2 PP3 e n2. n1 causes n2 to be described by PP1 PP2 PP3 etc.

6) mi lon nena sinpin tawa sinpin mi sama uta waso e sike musi loje. I move the funny red ball to my face, fastened it to my nose and made it similar to a bird beak.

And the "cause to be be described by such a prepositional phrase" pattern makes the following sentences almost work.

7) mi kepeken ilo sona e jan lili. I made the child use computers.
8) mi sama kala suli e mi tan pali moku. I made my self like a whale and fastened on account of my cooking. Work the same as bare adj or noun, except the transformation is incomplete.
9) mi poka supa e ilo oki mi. I put my glasses beside the bed. Works okay if poka means "located beside"
10) mi poka jan ante e jan wan. I made the one collaborate/co-operate with the other.

Tan
11) mi moli e jan. taso mi tan moli e jan ante. I killed a man. But I pinned it on another guy. (Made him into the cause of death)

Tan is the odd ball out. Most of the above constructions are some sort of causitive. And tan is about causes. So it's like causing something to cause something.

And tan doesn't seem to be used so often for the "from" as in "emerging from such a place" Or maybe it does.

12) mi tan esun e jan ike. I made the unpleasant man leave the store.

I'm sure I've never seen #5 in the wild. But if we did, do we figure it is legal in any sense of the word?
janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: Prep phrases that take direct objects

Post by janKipo »

Somewhere in there is x1 li tan x2 e x3: x1 removes x3 from x2. (tan means source, not -- basically -- cause)
There are also all the transitive denominitive verbs that mean "apply noun to" (e.g. telo ? water, wash).
Beyond that, I'm not too clear what you are about (never mind that this is not a generalization of anything in the grammar)
All the prepositional phrases between the first and the e are modifiers. presumably to the noun in the first, but they are not (as you have written them) PPs, just a string of modifiers, each modifying the block to the left (the reason -- or one of them -- for requiring 'pi' before an internal PP).
6, as it stands, means something like "I moved the funny red ball to the birdily mouthily evenly mine frontily moving nose" or some such -- odd in any case. Even if it did fit your pattern, it wouldn't say what you want but would rather be about placing something on the nose that is toward my front which is similar to a beak.You can get what you want by using a bunch of li and hoping the object carries over.
7 doesn't work at all, since kepeken doesn't have that causative sense and isn't a preposition in verb position (that is the only following NP is DO).
8 is fine but just an ordinary sentence, not a novelty.
9 needs lon before poka, but then is perfectly ordinary
10 is iffy because poka is so slippery, but, assuming it is a prep in verb slot, then this is a normal case.
11 is normal and means "I killed a guy. I saved another guy from death."
Why is emerging from not from? It is a motion notion like lon and tawa, indeed, the natural third: to, from and at.
12 is just right -- and perfectly normal.
Number 5 is perfectly legal, of course, but doesn't mean what you want it to. There several variants on it that are both legal and get closer to what you want.
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