Unit 5. Attributes

Fundamental observations – demonstrated by means of strange individual achievements of the contrariness of everyday life, which is probably a bit too long as a title, the more so as it contains a (let’s be honest) most inelegant genitive chain.

We are now pretty much finished with the basics. Now, in the second quarter of the tutorial, things will be getting more serious.

Bracket and coordination

A bracket is a two-word construction where the object’s outer case equals the predicate’s inner case.

Here we have a predicate ‘mechanic’ (‘the sender of building machines’) with ‘Nechwatal’ as its nominative object, which means that Nechwatal is, yes, the sender of building machines: the mechanic just mentioned. This is the first application of brackets: the translation of English appositives, which are essentially attributes consisting of a noun (and this will become important in a moment).

A coordination consists of two sibling objects in the same outer case.

This also equates ‘mechanic’ with ‘Nechwatal’ as both are the recipient of speaking. Recall there is only one recipient, so we can exclude the possibility of Nechwatal and a mechanic being spoken to (which would be phrased with an inner partitive). And the exact reason why there is only one recipient is still to come.

We will be using brackets more often because they clearly indicate that their object (‘Nechwatal’ in our example) characterises their predicate (‘mechanic’). Coordinations, by contrast, consist of two separate objects of the main predicate; it has to be deduced from their matching outer cases that both contain information about the same person. In this sense, brackets are better suited to translate appositives and similar constructions.

Actually, we have already seen brackets (in the factive) in the previous unit when we treated desorption, and also coordinations when we translated ‘and’ and ‘or’.

Adjectives and participles as attributes and adverbs

As you know, Lemizh does not make any difference between nouns and adjectives. It also doesn’t distinguish nouns and participles: just as lÌbv. can mean ‘the pale (or white) one, a pale thing; pale’, wèx. can mean ‘the speaker; speaking’, and fmÌxk. ‘a spilt thing; spilt’ (with inner acc because ‘spill’ is a verb of movement). Hence we can use brackets (and coordinations) to translate attributes consisting of an adjective or a participle.

While in English ‘a speaking man’ refers to a man speaking at the present moment, and ‘spilt milk’ refers to the effects of milk having been spilt in the past, the Lemizh phrases do not contain any temporal information. The perfect aspect of ‘spilt milk’ will be treated in the chapter on the perfect in unit 10, temporal distinctions (‘a speaking man’ vs. ‘a man, which will be speaking’) in the chapter on tense in unit 12.

Make sure you don’t confuse active participles (‘a speaking man’), gerunds (‘Speaking is difficult with one’s mouth full’) and the continuous forms of verbs (‘He is speaking’).

Feel free to include additional information in the form of objects of the bracket’s object, keeping in mind that the outer case of a word defines its relation to its predicate’s stem (as in ‘the teller of a war’).

Adverbial adjectives and participles work just the same. The English verb is translated as the bracket’s predicate, the adverb as the object. Because we are translating verbs with an inner factive, the bracket’s case is also the factive. (But we will use other inner cases for translating verbs in unit 10.)

Coordinations and brackets within brackets

A further object of the bracket’s predicate can result in a coordination inside the bracket, and an object of the object can result in nested brackets. (Recall that ‘wise’, as an adjective of competence, has an inner nominative.)

The first phrase uses a coordination to desribe a man who is wise as well as pale. This use of English ‘and’ differs from the one we saw in the previous unit: the man is wise and pale at the same time (the man = the wise one = the pale one), so we don’t use an inner partitive here. The second phrase uses a bracket to describe a wise man, who is also pale. The third one describes a pale man, who is also wise.

The second and third phrases differ only by an inversion between ‘wise’ and ‘pale’. A bracket is the only situation in which an inversion works even though there is no main predicate involved; this is rather unimaginatively called a bracket inversion. Generally, we should use this freedom to put the more relevant word first: this is why ‘man’ and ‘milk’ are the predicates in above brackets. Whether Nechwatal should be the predicate or the object in the first example depends on context.

The coordination here does not have the disadvantage described above because both ‘wise’ and ‘pale’ are objects of ‘man’ and thus are clearly meant to characterise it. Put differently, this example consists of the brackets Ìx mèvy. male-acc¹ wise-nom-acc². and Ìx lÌbvy. male-acc¹ white-acc-acc²., and the coordination is only accidental.

Attributes and adverbs that are not brackets

Sometimes an attributive adjective does not translate as a bracket.

‘good’ specifies the speaking, not the speaker. You can think of this as of an inversion of gájd wàxy. good-fact¹ speak-fact-acc^2a. ‘He makes the speaking good’, the gerund ‘speaking’ being translated with an inner factive.

The same applies to adjectives that are used adverbially to describe participles. Adverbial adjectives describing other adjectives translate a bit differently: the second example contains an inversion of pnàgc gmrìly. terrible-fact¹ warm-cons-acc². ‘Someone makes the warmth terrible’, ‘warmth’ being an abstract noun related to an adjective and therefore having an inner consecutive, as we have seen before.

Partitive bracket and coordination; exclusive ‘or’

The brackets we have discussed up till now (outer case of the object = inner case of the predicate) are called cumulative brackets because they accumulate information: it is a man and it is a wise one and it is a pale one. A partitive bracket is quite a different matter: it has a partitive outer case of the object and a plain inner case of the predicate and thereby defines a basic set for its predicate.

The exclusive ‘or’ (‘either … or’) is a partitive bracket of ‘one’, ‘some’ or another suitable numeral with an ‘and’-construction (i.e. inner partitives), which results in the numeral plus an inclusive ‘or’ construction (i.e. inner and outer partitives). If possible, the inclusive ‘or’ – without the numeral – is to be preferred, as it is simpler.

Partitives of brackets’ predicates

An outer partitive of the bracket’s predicate isn’t in any way special. If the predicate has an inner partitive, the object’s outer case is still a plain (non-partitive) case despite the fact that the two cases don’t match.

Exercises

	Translate (both as bracket and coordination where applicable):
	I see a rogue baker.
	I see a strangely behaving good dancer.
	I see one strangely behaving among (= from the set of) the good dancers.
	He is playing a black trumpet.
	Explain why bracket inversions are possible, in contrast to other inversions inside a sentence.
	If a bracket’s predicate has an inner partitive case, why is the object’s outer case not a partitive?
	What does a bracket with an inner partitive of the predicate and a corresponding outer partitive of the object mean?

Material

The noun phrase wèx nàgcy. speak-nom¹ war-fact-acc². ‘the teller of a war’ is derived from wàx nàgcy. speak-fact¹ war-fact-acc². ‘She tells about a war’ by a simple change of the main predicate’s inner case. The same concept can be used to translate noun phrases describing materials.

These phrases are different from accusative brackets. jmÌs drÌty. door-acc¹ wood-acc-acc². ‘the door, [i.e.] wood’ would equate the door with the wood, while the dative object in jmÌs drÌti. door-acc¹ wood-acc-dat². says that the door is what we are speaking about, while wood is the thing (or material) that was made into the door.

Genitive

Translated with the benefactive

The genitive marker -’s as in ‘the mechanic’s coat’ and the preposition ‘of’ as used in ‘the tower of the castle’ have more or less the same function, so we will call them both ‘genitives’. Their most prominent function is to mark possession. In Lemizh, the benefactive case (U, beneficiary) can express possession as well as some non-possessive uses of the Indo-European genitive: ‘a man’s world, the teacher’s lounge, runner’s high’ etc. Depending on the situation, the causative (el, cause) or persuasive cases (Ol, reason) might also be appropriate.

If the coat formerly belonged to someone else, or will belong to someone else in the future, the mechanic is still currently the only beneficiary of coat-making; so the rule that there is exactly one benefactive object is satisfied.

Translated with other cases

Quite often, though, the genitive has other functions, and the benefactive case does not suit our purpose. ‘the man’s gift’ is not a gift made for the man, but one given by him. In such situations it is a good idea to transform the construction into a seperate sentence to find the appropriate case, and then replace the predicate’s inner factive with a different case (unless we are dealing with a gerund-like abstract noun). Note that some of the objects are agentive.

Kinship verbs express a sender-content relationship between two people. This is easiest to see with psràb. ‘to make/father a child’: the mechanic’s child-acc was made by the mechanic-nom. But, as already mentioned, the nominative has nothing to do with the mechanic acting. An uncle-acc is ‘made’ (from the receptive viewpoint: a man is turned into an uncle-acc) by its nephew or niece-nom through their birth. It follows that a genitive construction having a kinship term with an inner accusative for a predicate needs an object with an outer nominative, and vice versa.

Translated with brackets

Lastly, we have appositive genitives and other genitives that are translated as brackets (or coordinations).

Brackets also serve to paraphrase genitives of all kinds to express finer differences.

Indo-European genitives cover a wide array of meanings. We will meet some further ones in later units: for ‘a group of people’, see Grouping numerals in unit 7; for ‘days’ work’ see Distributive numerals in unit 8; for ‘the inside of the ship’ and ‘the coutyard of the castle’ see Adverbials in unit 12; for ‘two weeks’ notice’ see Measuring in unit 12.

Adjectives of possession

Adjectives indicating possession are translated like the genitive.

Adjectives indicating the possessed thing are inversions of the genitive (in its various translations).

Exercises

	Translate:
	the beaver’s fish
	the beaver’s dam
	the love of music
	the [biological] family of tortoises
	a bearded baker
	a plastic bottle

Unit 6