Unit 10. Topic and predicative

I have built, built more bridges than I’ve burned
And I have helped, helped more people than I’ve hurt
But in my life, I’m still humbled by how little I have learned

Topic

Up till now, our example sentences had main predicates with inner factives, meaning that they were claiming reality of their main predicates’ actions, per Rule Seven. We say that these sentences had the factive topicalised. Other cases can be topicalised instead – we have had a glimpse of this in the previous unit when we mentioned that the noun phrase wèx nàgcy. speak-nom¹ war-fact-acc². actually means ‘A teller of a war exists; there is a teller of a war’, and dmèt mÌse lÌbvy. see-nom¹ mouse-acc-nom² white-acc-acc³. means ‘There are seen things, white mice’. These are sentences with the nominative topicalised, claiming reality of their main predicates’ senders.

Constructions of the kind ‘It’s her who’s building bridges’ are called cleft sentences, and ‘She builds bridges’ is an implicit cleft (as was ‘She doesn’t eat it because of the vitamins’ in unit 8).

Dative and receptive verbs

Lemizh verbs corresponding to dative/receptive word pairs (‘give’ vs. ‘get’) can be topicalised to expressly distinguish the dative from the receptive viewpoint.

As you remember, verbs can also be qualified with different agents (‘give’ vs. ‘take’), allowing for a number of different shades of meaning.

Perfect

The English perfect signifies the consequence of a completed action: ‘I have built bridges’ = ‘The bridges are built, they exist now’. To phrase a sentence about the consequence in Lemizh, we topicalise the consecutive case (il, direct consequence, effect).

We can now also express the perfect aspect of a passive participle (although this is only rarely necessary) by building a consecutive into a compound.

Stative verbs

English stative verbs are typically perfect and often receptive, and are translated accordingly:

• ‘sit’ = ‘have sat down, have been seated’
• ‘owe’ = ‘have borrowed, have been lent’
• ‘know’ = ‘have been taught’, but also ‘have seen = know by sight, have heard = know from hearsay, have read, have been acquainted with’ etc.
• ‘mean’ = ‘have been given [a] meaning’
• ‘be’ = ‘have been made’
• ‘wait’ is the perfect of wràks., which translates somewhat awkwardly as ‘start waiting’, in the same sense as ‘be given a meaning’ equals ‘start meaning something’.
• etc.

Some of the literal translations (‘have been made’) are misleading: it is not required that someone has actually made it. (Recall that a case can denote ‘no one/nothing at all’, but it will still exist.)

‘This is my tortoise’ is equivalent to ‘I possess this tortoise’, so ‘possess, have got’ can be translated as a genitive. Such sentences are often about the existence of the possessed thing; hence the different topicalisation in the following example.

Recall the remark in unit 3, Ambiguous plot usage: ‘be happy’ isn’t simply a state like being tall or brown-haired. On the other hand, having been seated is enough for sitting: in this case, nothing else needs to happen. ‘sit’ is a genuine static verb.

Achieving a purpose (or not); modified topics

Some English verb pairs are in a relationship of trying and achieving to each other: examples include ‘search – find’, ‘ask – (getting an) answer’, ‘command – obey’, as well as ‘try – achieve/manage’ itself. To express any of the second verbs in these pairs, we use the first and topicalise the final case (Ul, purpose, aim).

The meaning of this sentence is not that I have an aim for my search in mind, but that the aim (i.e. finding the Snark) exists in the world of the parole, it is grammatically real. Contrast this verb with ràdj. ‘discover, find’, which does not imply having looked for it. Also note that the Snark is the dative object, which additionally expresses that the search reaches the Snark. This is another example of ambiguous usage.

A purpose not achieved can be denoted by negating the final case, a construction called a negated topic. Note the difference in degree of reality that is caused by an inversion: the second example does not claim that the thing is not found.

The compound can additionally be topicalised, depending on whether we are talking about the reality of the searching-fact whose aim (the finding) doesn’t exist, or about the finding-fin which doesn’t exist. The difference is often negligible so that we can just go with the factive and avoid repetition of the case marker.

We have actually met a few negated topics and modified topics with other weighting numerals before we had the terminology: the verb for the recurring part of a number (see the next chapter), ‘He hardly ever queues’, ‘He never queues / Nobody is queuing’ and some of the exercises in unit 7, ‘eat up’ in unit 8, as well as the inversion ban examples ‘He never listens / He has no reason to listen’ and the last two exercises in unit 9; and we will meet one with a modal verb in unit 13.

Beginning and ending

To express the beginning or ending of an action, we want the ingressive (eR, starting time) or egressive cases (iR, closing time), respectively. Two more negated topics follow.

A grammatical form expressing the beginning of an action is generally called inchoative aspect, one expressing the ending of an action is called cessative aspect.

Other cases

Needless to say, each and every case can be topicalised. The tentive (o, intention), for example, signifies that the intention to perform an action exists; and the affirmative (al, fact) can be used to highlight the factual statement as opposed to the action itself.

Objects of topicalised verbs

How shall we translate ‘I found it because of the baker’? Because of Rule Three (‘The outer case of the first word of an object defines its relation to its predicate’s stem …’), xÙlsk jexèel. search-fin¹ bake-nom-caus². would mean ‘I found it, having searched for it because of the baker’. To solve this, we convert the aim of searching (the finding) into an action in its own right with a pseudo-desorption, a contruction that would be a desorption if ‘find’ were a verb with an inner factive and could thus be desorbed from the general verb là. ‘to act’. This new action can then accept objects.

The example ‘I stopped talking about orangutans because of the noise’ only needs this kind of construction because of the persuasive object; the others (‘I’ and ‘orangutan’) are objects of ‘talk’. ‘I stopped him’ needs a pseudo-desorption because ‘I’ is the agent of ending the movement rather than the movement itself; and ‘I answer “blue”’ is based on the same idea. Don’t overuse this kind of construction: if all objects can be assigned to the same predicate, it isn’t necessary.

An object in the case of the topic, including the corresponding partitive case, never needs a construction with là.; a bracket serves just as well.

Pseudo-desorptions also occur in other cases; we will encounter an accusative example in unit 12.

Topic nesting

We can also apply a pseudo-desorption and then topicalise the new main predicate là. to convey two (or more) topics at once. This is called a topic nesting.

Adverbs of topicalised verbs

We have learned that adjectives and participles used adverbially form a factive bracket with their predicate. Now topicalising the predicate does not change the outer case of the adverb, even though the resulting construction isn’t a bracket any more. The same is true of other factive brackets, notably multiplicative numerals.

Exercises

	Why do adverbially used adjectives keep the outer factive when their predicate is topicalised? What would the following bracket express instead?
	lèR xlÌjeR.
	do-ing1 strange-acc-ing2.
	Translate:
	He ate his fill.
	He knows the sound of a trumpet.
	The beaver has taken my lace.
	I loudly answer ‘blue’ to your question. (Include the pronouns.)

Predicative

In Indo-European languages, the predicative is a part of a sentence that ‘predicates’ (describes) the subject or object. In the simplest situations, it is a noun, adjective, participle (or pronoun). Predicatives can also be longer noun phrases (‘He is an old, bearded lace-maker’).

In Lemizh, the distinctions in the table above are lost. Predicatives of both subject and object turn into accusative or dative objects (the difference between these two cases being described below). You already know that nouns, adjectives and participles behave quite the same in Lemizh. Longer noun phrases simply become objects that consist of more than one word.

Predicate noun

In the chapter on concrete nouns we have seen how ‘The thread becomes lace’ is translated. ‘The thread is lace’ is the consequence (‘is’ being a stative verb), so we topicalise the consecutive case.

The first two constructions are again examples of the dative (thread and child, respectively) describing the ‘raw material’ onto which the properties of being lace or goose, respectively, are imposed. Predicatives of this type are called resultative (describing the result of an action) in Indo-European grammars. On the other hand, some predicatives do not imply ‘making’ something, but rather describe an inherent property of a subject or object; these are called depictive. This is exemplified in the last sentence, which is an absorption of the second accusative of mìl cnyÌ RÌjy. make-cons¹ child-acc-acc² goose-acc-acc². – an accusative coordination, equating ‘goose’ and ‘child’. (The term ‘resultative’ should not be confused with topicalisation of the consequence, which is expressed by the consecutive case.)

From the latter example we can also derive the bracket RÌj cnÌy. goose-acc¹ child-acc-acc². and the inverted compound RyjcnÌ. goose-acc-child-acc¹., both meaning ‘child goose, young goose’ – compare these compounds from brackets.

We have previously translated ‘The beaver is a lace-maker’ simply with khlá trÌxke. lace-fact¹ beaver-acc-nom^2a., which centers on the beaver’s action as a lace-maker. The new translation focuses on his position (as in ‘Royal Lace-Maker by Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen’).

The object predicate nouns are straightforward. They normally talk about actions, not states, and thus have a main predicate with the factive (or some other non-consecutive case) topicalised.

Predicate adjective and participle

Now for the adjectival and participial predicatives. Again, the object is in the dative for resultative and in the accusative for depictive predicatives.

Now it should become clearer why we have kept using the consecutive case for abstract nouns denoting states (see Adjectives in unit 4, Negators in unit 6, Weighted words in unit 8): the first two examples also translate as ‘The beauty of the woman exists’. What’s more, negation gives nà prìljy bÌy. ⇒ priljnÌ bÌy. ⇔ bÌ priljnÌy. not-fact¹ beautiful-cons-acc² female-acc-acc³. ⇒ beautiful-cons-not-acc¹ female-acc-acc². ⇔ female-acc¹ beautiful-cons-not-acc-acc². ‘The beauty of the woman does not exist’ ⇒ ‘the ugly woman’.

In English, we can restrict the scope of the adjective with ‘for’; in Lemizh we use a partitive coordination.

English infinitives are better seen as part of the subject, not the predicative, and translated accordingly.

Object predicate adjectives again have main predicates with a non-consecutive case.

Compare the second sentence with the plot of the grouping numerals. ‘He sorts the umbrellas by colour’ works exactly the same way.

Why don’t we use a bracket for the depictive sentence? nàgw bunÌy² wÌcgy³. drink-fact¹ coffee-acc-acc² black-acc-acc³. means ‘She drinks black coffee’ (an adjectival attribute). Using a coordination, we make ‘(the) black (thing)’ an object of ‘drink’, placing it nearer to the main predicate than to the object ‘coffee’. This is a concept very similar to our predicative.

Adjectives as adverbs, take two

In the chapter on adjectives and participles as attributes and adverbs, we translated adverbs in ‘-ly’ (‘He behaves strangely’) as factive brackets. This is not necessarily a good method with adjectives expressing emotion. ‘The tortoise is greeting me happily’, for example, does not mean that the action of greeting is happy, but that the greeting tortoise is happy (is the sender of happiness). Likewise, ‘She sings sadly’ means that she, not the singing, is sad. A coordination comes rather close to this meaning, placing the adjective of emotion nearer to the main predicate than a bracket without attributing the emotion to the action (similarly to our translation of depictive predicatives).

If the woman isn’t sad but is singing as if she were, we use a qualitative object, to which we turn in the next unit.

Exercises

	Translate:
	The sky is blue [i.e., and that’s a fact].
	The sky is blue [i.e., again after the rain].
	They elected me chief. (Being elected is the aim of voting. — Include the first person pronoun.)
	The tortoise is greeting Achilles happily.

Unit 11