[Lingtyp] fear + NEG

[Anvita Abbi]

Here is the grammatical information with phonetic transcription to clear
the air. Semantically the two sentences are equal. I don't think that (1)
is passive.

1.    *mujh-e           **ɖǝr         h**ɛ           ki             vo
          a             na           ja-ye*

1sg-dat          fear        aux         comp      3sg         come
 neg
go-subjunctive

‘I am afraid lest he come’ OR ‘I am afraid he might come’

Sentence 1 is equivalent to sentence 2 with non-negative and future tense.

2.       *mujh-e                 **ɖǝr         h**ɛ
ki             vo           a             ja-yega*

1sg-dat                 fear        aux         comp      3sg         come
go-fut.3msg

‘I afraid that he will come’
Anvita

Prof. Anvita Abbi

Director: Centre for Oral and Tribal Literature

Sahitya Akademi

Rabindra Bhavan

35, Ferozeshah Road

New Delhi 110 001
www.andamanese.net
President: Linguistic Society of India




On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 5:03 AM, Mike Morgan <mwmbombay at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20150320/3b2cf59d/attachment.htm>