[Lingtyp] fear + NEG

[Mike Morgan]

Also a clarification on Anvita's glossing

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 3:16 AM, Anvita Abbi <anvitaabbi at gmail.com> wrote:

> *mujhe       Dar     hai       ki           vo         aa       na
> jaye*
> 1sg.Dat     fear     AUX    COMP   3sg       come  NEG  come
> Literal: 'I am afraid that he does not come'
>

*aa* of course IS 'come' but *jaaye* (not *jaye*, n'est pas?) is literally
'go'. And also, sicne Anvita does not label grammatical forms of verbs, *aa*
is a nonfinite verb stem while *jaye* is subjunctive (or optative of you
prefer). BUT more importantly perhaps the construction *aa jaye* is a
PASSIVE.

Like other commenters I would not pretend to offer any native speaker
insights *and in fact, my best Indic language, Nepali, has a very
different, purely synthetic, passive). BUT as a speaker of Japanese as
well, I am wondering also whether the passive here might complicate things,
especially in such cases as this where we are obviously NOT dealing with a
canonical passive (*aa* is an intransitive). What I was wondering is
whether in Hindi there might be any of the "acted upon negatively" nuances
found w2ith the Japanese passive (e.g. 雨に降られた。 *ame ni furareta* 'I was
rained upon'), in which the negative semantics MIGHT also be interacting
with the grammatical negative? (not saying this DOES happen, just that it
must be considered as a possibility)

Of course, an example with an active form of the verb would quickly set us
all straight on this ;-)

mwm || *U*C> || mike || माईक || માઈક || মাঈক || மாஈக ||  مایک ||мика ||
戊流岸マイク
(aka Dr Michael W Morgan)
sign language instructor / sign language linguist / linguistic typologist
PCRV, PC Guyana
Deaf Association of Guyana
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