Unit 4. Nouns and adjectives

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
  They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
  They charmed it with smiles and soap.

Concrete nouns

We already can form some nouns, for example ‘war’ (the action of warring) or ‘speaker’ (the sender of speaking). ‘door’, ‘lion’ and some other words were used in the previous unit without explaining their inner cases (which were accusatives). The problem seems to be that these nouns – along with many others, say, ‘froth, soap, lace, ship, part’ – are not derived from verbs in English. In Lemizh, however, we have verbs such as:

We will call these nominal verbs. As always, the plot

• flows from a source of information;
• transports a content, which is the sum of properties, the definition, the function, or whatever makes the thing what it is;
• and reaches a recipient, which is the raw material (in the broadest sense) from which the thing is made, or what is to be transformed into the thing.

Looking at the verb àkh. ‘to build a ship’, the shipwright (nom) gives the building materials (dat) the properties or the function of a ship (acc). He confers, well, shipness on the materials. The shipness is sent by the shipwright, not because he is acting, but because he is the source: the image of the ship, so to say, comes from his head and materialises in wood, iron, ropes, and linen.

Now we can translate inner datives and accusatives of nominal verbs: psrìxk. froth-dat¹. is a frothed thing, psrÌxk. froth-acc¹. is a thing having the properties of froth. khlì. lace-dat¹. is a thing made into lace, khlÌ. lace-acc¹. is a thing having the properties of lace. When we are talking of ships or lions, we will usually not be interested in their making, but more in their properties or function: ‘ship’ is therefore translated as Ìkh., ‘lion’ as lÌw. (both having inner acc). The usefulness of an inner dative for the latter verb is open to doubt.

As you will have guessed, Ìkh. does not contain information about the number of ships: it can mean ‘the ship’ or ‘a ship’ as well as ‘the ships’ or ‘some ships’.

Actually, ‘nominal verbs’ are not a category of Lemizh verbs. They behave just like any other words, and it would probably be fairly difficult to explain the notion to a native Lemizh. This is simply a convenient way for an Indo-European speaking (and thinking) audience to refer to verbs which correspond, with an inner accusative, to our concrete nouns. After all, ‘to pulverise’ and ‘to split’ don’t behave in any special way in English.

Adjectives

Adjectives work just like nouns, making use of verbs such as:

lìbv. is something made white (or pale, as the butcher in our initial example); lÌbv. is something having the property ‘white’, i.e. a white thing. There is really no difference between nouns and adjectives in Lemizh. This is the same as Latin albus, which can mean ‘white’ as well as ‘the white one’. So, adjectival verbs are a subclass of nominal verbs.

Adjectives of emotion (‘angry, happy’, from the verbs described under Ambiguous usage in the previous unit), manner and competence (‘naughty, nice’ [Non-transporting usage], ‘fast, nimble, wise, good’) describe the source of the emotion, manner or competence and are therefore constructed with an inner nominative. But adjectives of manner and competence can also be used in a different sense: in ‘nice words, a fast race, a wise deed’ they have inner accusatives because here they describe what is made nice, fast, or wise. Another adjective with an inner nominative is ‘warm’ in ‘a warm coat’, because this is a coat making me warm, a source of warmth.

We will learn about the main use of adjectives, their use as attributes (‘the dear uncle’), in the next unit.

Why is there a verb ‘to make something white’, but ‘to make it snow’ is expressed with a causative object instead (as in the previous unit)? The difference is that the latter can be expressed with a causative because there is a verb ‘to snow’, while the former does not allow ‘stepping down’ in that way without violating the principle that every word stem denotes an action. Conversely, Lemizh does not have a word meaning ‘to cause, to make someone do something’.

Abstract nouns

Adjectival verbs can take certain inner cases – most importantly the consecutive – to form equivalents of English abstract nouns that do not express actions and thus are not like gerunds. The warmth, for example, can be seen as the consequence (consecutive case) of having made something warm, or sometimes of the fact (affirmative case) of something being made warm. It can also be seen as a warm thing (accusative) in sentences such as ‘He sat in the warmth’. Likewise, ‘beauty, difficulty, whiteness, colour’ are the consequences or sometimes facts of making something beautiful, difficult, white, and of colouring something, respectively.

This use of the consecutive also illustrates why its descriptor is ‘direct consequence, effect’: the consequence of having made the waistcoat white (its whiteness) has the effect that the crew stare in wonder, wherefore the beaver’s eyes start to hurt, etc. The consequences are multiplied progressively, but only the direct ones form the consecutive case. Likewise, the causative’s descriptor is ‘direct cause’.

By contrast, the abstract nouns derived from adjectives of emotion, manner and competence (‘happiness, speed, wisdom’) refer to the actions of being happy, moving or acting fast, or behaving wisely, and therefore are gerund-like nouns with an inner factive; or sometimes an affirmative to focus on the facts.

Places

The inner locative and scenic cases are used for place names. lemàrc. ‘the country of Lemaria’ is the inner locative of the verb lemàc. ‘to make Lemizh’. A seat is the intended or chosen location for sitting down, and thus translated as zdòrs., the inner scenic of zdàs. ‘to sit down, to seat oneself’.

Verbs of work and profession

Verbs such as ‘make lace, bake, garden, teach, host, play the trumpet, sail, ring a bell’ make use of a number of inner cases to convey different concepts:

• The inner factive gives us the gerunds or gerund-like abstract nouns ‘lace-making’, ‘baking’, ‘gardening’, etc.
• The inner nominative gives us khlè. ‘lace-maker’ (the sender of lace-making) etc. This really just means ‘one making lace’, so it can be used to describe a hobby lace-maker, or a person who is just making lace at the moment, as well. Conversely, the verb plus a nominative object – khlá trÌxke. lace-fact¹ beaver-acc-nom^2a. – translates as ‘The beaver is making lace / The beaver is working as a lace-maker / The beaver is a lace-maker.’
  Many job titles, e.g. ‘baker, gardener, teacher, waiter, host, trumpet player, doctor’, have an inner nominative; principally because professions are often about producing or selling something, or about providing a kind of service. ‘friend’ as the ‘sender of being friends’ (which is also an action, not a state) can also be put in this category, as well as ‘witch’ as the ‘sender of witching’.
• Inner datives are: ‘student’ (the recipient of teaching), ‘customer’ (in a restaurant: the recipient of, well, waitering), ‘guest’ (the recipient of hosting), ‘winner’ (the recipient of the winning, the one who gets the victory), ‘patient’ (the recipient of doctoring). Some, um, job titles – ‘spy, thief’ – also belong here. And probably ‘hedge fund manager’.
• Inner accusative: ‘garden’ (as opposed to a place made into a garden, which would need a dative).
• Inner scenic: ‘bakery, school’.
• The inner instrumental is used to form tool nouns, e.g. ‘sail’ (the means of sailing), ‘bell’ (the means of ringing), ‘trumpet, shovel, paddle, computer’, including certain body parts such as ‘leg’ (the means of walking), ‘eye’ (the means of seeing) and ‘nose’ (the means of smelling), as well as ‘language’ (the means of speaking). As there is only one instrumental, the means of sailing is really a set comprising the sail, the wind, and maybe other things as well. We will come back to this point in unit 9 and again on the pragmatics pages. (You should now have a déjà vu related to the previous unit.)

	Translate:
	wemè.
	dam-nom1.
	khlè grÌwi.
	lace-nom1 thread-acc-dat2.
	lÌbv wÌcgi.
	white-acc1 black-acc-dat2.
	xàrcg.
	light-loc1.
	spèz.
	happy-nom1.
	rìljd.
	red-cons1.
	saxáf gwèti.
	trumpet-fact1 teach-nom-dat2a.
	jirxáf gwitè dùsky.
	lift-fact1 teach-dat-nom2a circle-ins-acc2.

The semantic tree (the tree of meaning)

Verbs can name more or less general actions. ‘perceive’, for example, is pretty general, while ‘see, hear, smell’ are more specific – they name sub-categories of the former, which names a super-category of the latter. We can portray these relationships between verbs (and so, in Lemizh, between all words) with a tree structure, on top of which is the most general category of all, named by the verb là. do-fact¹. ‘happen; do, act’. Here is a small section of the tree. The verb mà. make-fact¹. ‘make something from something’, receptive ‘turn into something’ is on top of the branch of nominal (and adjectival) verbs.

The relationship of a sub-category to a super-category verb can usually be described in terms of restricting the semantic range of an object, which comes down to restricting what kinds of entities certain objects (i.e. cases) can refer to. The meaning of ‘to build ships’ is ‘turn something into something’ plus a certain accusative object, namely ships; ‘speak’ is ‘produce a sound’ plus a certain kind of transmitted sound (the accusative, again); ‘hear’ can be interpreted as a restriction of the sensual stimulus (accusative) to sounds, or the restriction of the means (instrumental) to the ear; ‘hunt’ is ‘do’ plus a specific action (factive).

The tree is only a rough representation. This is not the place to discuss the subtleties of semantics, but be aware that a verb can have more than one super-category: ‘watch television’ has the super-category ‘hear’ as well as ‘see’; ‘illuminate’ can be perceived as an adjectival verb or a perceptual verb. Besides, the structure of the tree is not fixed: whales would have been seen as a sub-category of fish a few centuries ago, not of mammals as today.

là. ‘happen, do’ has useful applications with various inner cases. lì. is ‘the recipient’, lò. ‘the intention’, lÒl. ‘the reason’, làr. ‘the place (where something is happening)’, etc.; là. used like a gerund is simply ‘the happening, the doing’ = ‘the event, the deed’. mÌ. is ‘a thing’.

Absorption and desorption

A verb can absorb an object to which it is a super-category verb. A good example is mà. ‘to turn something into something’, which can absorb nominal verbs in the accusative. Absorption works under the condition that the object has identical inner and outer cases that correspond to the semantic relationship described above – accusatives for nominal verbs, factives for ‘hunt, give, perceive’ etc., and so on; absorptions with factives always work.

The opposite process is called desorption.

Logical conjunctions

‘and’

The conjunction ‘and’ is translated with sibling objects in the same outer case and inner partitives.

As we know, there is exactly one accusative, part of which is the beaver and part of which is the butcher. Therefore, we cannot omit the partitive case suffixes because this would mean that the beaver is the accusative and the butcher is also the accusative. You can already guess what that sentence would mean; but we will learn it officially in the next unit.

The one accusative object of our example is also the main predicate’s agent; this includes the butcher. Put differently: the agent is ‘the beaver, among others’, the ‘others’ being (at least) the butcher.

To connect two predicates or two whole sentences with ‘and’, we usually need a partitive desorption. In the first example sentence, the effect is as if the objects (‘butcher’ and ‘beaver’) had two predicates.

More on the translation of ‘and’ can be found in the dictionary.

Inclusive ‘or’

The inclusive ‘or’ (‘and/or’) is a combination of a inner and outer partitives.

The exclusive ‘or’ (‘either … or’) will be treated in the next unit.

	Explain, in your own words, why inner and outer case must be identical for absorption to work.
	Translate:
	lèR.
	do-ing1.
	Give three possibilities to connect these two verbs with ‘and’:
	fpràf. khnà.
	rustle-fact1. shout-fact1.

Unit 5