Helmbrecht Paper: Terminology 'modal prefix'

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, R. Rankin wrote:

> I always thought of this as "voice" rather than "mode". To me, voice
> is what the more current notion of "valence" is all about.  I'm
> surprised at the 'to eat' and 'to eat the food' pair, since I'd have
> expected sort of the reverse meanings.  The verb 'eat' ordinarily
> implies 'eat SOMEthing', so I'd expect waruuc (or waaruc or whatever
> it is) to just mean something like 'to go around eating' -- the wa-
> ought to take away the object.  My mistake I guess.  Are you sure
> there's only one wa-?  As usual I suspect homophony here.

I suspect Bob is replying to the quibbles post, rather than the
terminological post, when he comments on the 'eat something' gloss.
This raises an interesting procedural point that I've noticed in the past.
In glossing transitive verbs, e.g., 'eat', I tend to write something like:

ruu'c^ vt.  'to eat something' (Bob's 'eat SOMEthing')

The subject argument is implicit, the 'something' indicates that this verb
has/makes/requires an object reference.

An actual sentence like ruu'c^-s^aNnaN would be 'he ate it'.

On the other hand, with a detransitivized verb I'd write:

waru'c^ va.  'to eat'

In other words, I'd use just 'eat' to suggest use without an implicit
object.

And, an actual sentence like waru'c^-s^aNnaN would be glossed 'he ate' or
'he ate something', with the something intended to emphasize the lack of
an explicit argument.

The weirdness is that including 'something' in the gloss in the lexicon
emphasizes transitivity, while including 'something' in the gloss in a
text or interlinear situation emphasizes detransitivization.  This bothers
me a bit, but I think we're doomed to things like this when dealing with
incommensurate systems.

Anyway, I should emphasize that the additional twist of suggesting that
wa- forms involve not the absence of an argument (usually object), but the
indication of a contextually implicit argument, is mine.  Lipkind offers a
pretty straightforward account, and the glosses I included were mine, not
his.