I am doing research, see?
In Malagasy, I have just been told, there is a prefix (maha-) that can attach to any verb, which seems to make it intensional. Or at least does something to it, sort of vaguely intensionalish. (I will stick with English word order and words, because it’s easier, and also I was told this, which means that I don’t have the sentences written down.)
You can say “Bakoly found the book.” Like English, this means that she ended up with the book. You can also say “Bakoly maha-found the book.” This means that she looked for the book, and the implicature is that she found it, but it’s defeasible: “Bakoly maha-found the book but she didn’t find it” makes perfect sense. (”#Bakoly found the book but she didn’t find it” doesn’t.[1])
That doesn’t seem so weird — in fact, the way to say “look for” is maha-find.
The verb kill works the same way. You can’t say “#Bakoly killed Be but he is still alive”; you can say “Bakoly maha-killed Be but he is still alive”. And the root kill is often translated as “beat, kill”.
You can even say “Be was maha-killed by Bakoly but he is still alive.” (If you know anything about Austronesian languages you will be rolling your eyes at what I’ve done with a passive. Bear with me, because the voice system isn’t the issue here.)
This works with all sorts of verbs. Leave, open . . . but maha-x isn’t quite the same as “tried to x”. Maha-x implicates that you succeeded; if anything, “tried to x” implicates the reverse. (I think.)
I’m also not sure what would happen with intransitives. Maha-die would mean an attempted suicide? How about putting in an adverb like “accidentally”? (I suspect that wouldn’t work.) What about unaccusatives?
Mostly this is why you can’t do semantics based on a half hour conversation with a second language speaker[2]. But it’s a problem I hope to look at, sooner or later, and which has yet to be looked at as a semantic (and not syntactic) problem. Sadly my next semantics course will be on something entirely different. Something interesting, but not this. And I will have enough independent work to keep me busy. Still,
[1] A # before a sentence means it’s grammatical but the meaning is not.
[2] Either that or mostly this is why I love being with other people who work on the same sorts of languages so that I can bounce ideas off without giving a brief primer on the field.
January 18th, 2004 at 7:44 pm
So basically adding maha- to a verb is like saying “tried to…”? I maha-understood that.
;-)
January 20th, 2004 at 4:47 pm
I have a linguist friend who studied (studies?) Malagasy; no wonder he doesn’t have much free time!
I like the idea of intensional prefixes, though. It reminds me of the “verb of completed or to be completed action”/”verb of indeterminate or inconclusive action” pairings in Russian. I always liked those.
January 20th, 2004 at 7:11 pm
friz (I can’t help myself; you should see my hair): Apparently it’s *not* like “tried to X”. I just don’t know exactly how not. Other than the does it mean probably success or not?
Rana: non-IE languages have lots of neat things going on like that. Which is why they’re fun/impossible to study. That’s unfair, really, because some IE languages do too. But not as much.
Now I am curious about who your friend is. I definitely know all the current workers in Malagasy, by name if not in person, and I know of a lot of ex-researchers. (I’m not going to ask. I’m just curious.)
I have to say that studying semantics made me finally really understand those diagrams we drew in French about passe compose and imparfait. Or perhaps I only understood the diagrams in semantics because we spent time and more time so that us anglophones might sometimes get the tense right when we spoke French.
February 1st, 2004 at 4:14 am
The chapter on Malagasy in Spencer & Zwicky’s Handbook of Morphology uses the words ‘bewildering’ and ‘mind-bogglingly’ in discussing this prefix. The one they particularly like is where it turns a pronoun into a transitive verb:
izany no maha-izy azy
that FOC makes-he him
‘That’s what makes him him.’