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On 4/28/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote:
A couple of problems: go vol kom. I want to eat. This is considered a shortening of go vol ke go kom. It's distinguished from "I voluntarily eat." because that would be: go vol sa kom. But a construction like: go pinmo kom. I intend to mean by this, "I forget to eat." but if you go by the pattern above, it seems to be short for: go pinmo ke go kom. I forget that I eat. Not the same thing. I wonder how other languages that lack an infinitive form deals with this ambiguity. Or could 'go pinmo kom' be considered short for go pinmo ke go dwa kom. But, that isn't exactly what "I forget to eat" means, is it?
More or less. If I forget to eat, it implies there was some period when I was too distracted to know I ought to eat. Maybe the problem is with your gloss or expanding of "go vol kom" instead. Or with polysemy of "ke"? For instance, da djan kan. must mean: S/he knows (how) to read. not "s/he knows that s/he reads". I suspect this may be a kind of issue that has to be dealt with one lexical item at a time; I'm not sure the grammar can set one rule that makes sense for all possible serial verbs. It underscores the importance of a real dictionary with usage information on the entries, rather than a mere glossary. And it may also be an issue with negation, which is implicit in "pinmo". There is an ambiguity perhaps in what element of the complement is being negated, or in what sense it is negated -- in this case forgotten. On 4/28/06, Rex May <rmay@hidden.email> wrote:
Maybe the problem is the meaning of "pinmo", which takes something noun-ish as an object. Either a noun or a clause. Could the solution be a word like 'karpinmo' do-forget, which takes a verb as object and means exactly what English 'forget' does in this context?
That would probably work too. -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry