Fw: deontic "will"

[Paolo Ramat]

Dear Paul,
thanks for your information. The 'dropping of _to be_ has been suggested for
the parallel Rom. construction, too. But I'm not fully convinced. I have to
further reflect thereupon.
Best, as ever,
Paolo (forwarding to LINGTYP, as you see)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Hopper" <ph1u at andrew.cmu.edu>
To: <paoram at UNIPV.IT>
Cc: "Discussion List for ALT" <LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 15:02
Subject: Re: deontic "will"


Paolo,
Greetings! It was good to talk to Anna in Santa Barbara.
Deontic <want/need plus past participle> is familiar in Pittsburgh, where
forms like the following are sometimes heard:
The shirts need washed
The table wants moved into the basement
The construction (identified as "dropping of To Be") is stereotyped for the
local dialect. Our department secretary has a joking tray label: "Letters
that need stamped"!

For some technical reason that I don't understand, I can't send messages
directly to ALT. Please forward the relevant parts of the message to the
list, would you?
With best wishes,
Paul

--On Monday, August 06, 2001 9:35 AM +0200 Volker Gast
<gast at ZEDAT.FU-BERLIN.DE> wrote:

> A sub-standard variety of Mexican Spanish spoken in Southern Mexico
> (Chiapas) has exactly the same construction:
>
> (1) Este carro quiere lavado. "This car has to be washed."
> (2) Quiere que vayas tu mismo. "You have to go yourself."
>
> In all likeliness, this construction is copied either from Tzotzil
> (Mayan) or from Zoque (Mixe-Zoque), both of which regularly use
> the verb "k'an" (to want, love) to express deontic modality:
>
> Tzotzil:
> (3) Sk'an ti cha'abteje ('You have to work', lit. 'It wants that you
> work')
> (4) Sk'an jtijtik ti jbintike. ('We have to beat our drums', lit. 'It
> wants we beat our pots')
>
> As far as I know, Tzotzil also has the construction "k'an + passive
> participle" (like in your Sardinian example "La casa vuole pagata"), but I
> would have to look at my corpus in order to find some examples.
>
> Zoque:
>
> (5) Shunba wa'y mangu tyu'nisu. ('He has to go and see her', lit.'It wants
> that go(aux) he sees her')
> (from Harrison et al. (1981: 156), Diccionario Zoque de Copainalá, ILV.)
>
>
> __________________
> Volker Gast
> FU Berlin
> Institut für Englische Philologie
> Goßlerstraße 2-4
> 14195 Berlin
>
> Tel.: 030/838 72314