• when used as a modifier of a preceding predicate
talo iso "big house"
• vocatives & imperatives
tule, seneki! "come, kitty!" (is this too ambiguous? e.g. polo! could be either "hey, runner!" or "run!")
• with pronouns as an alternative possession structure
ni mama "my mother"
• with the quantifiers po and hu in a pragmatic rather than logical context
po mehe i pua "men are bad"; ana hu sai la ni! "give me some tea!"
• with the negative operator na in the same way
na sene i ne tia "there are no cats in there"
• with the adverbializer mo when the predicate is non-referential
ta lalu mo sene "she sings like a cat"
It's this last usage in particular that I'd like to explore today, as there are other particles that exert what might be called an "adverbializing" force, in which context it's often the case that none of the specifiers appears to fit the bill completely.
This came up for me recently around locator predicates. Suppose *sala means "inside." Predicates like this let us refine our expression of position: ne ka talo can mean "in, on, at, around the house," but something like ne ka sala ka talo ni can mean only "inside my house."
The question is, what particle should precede sala in the above example? It's true that my house does, indeed, have a real, specific, individual inside space that you can point at. This would seem to necessitate ka as used above. The thing is, though, that it's not really being used that way. We're not saying ka sala ka talo se i *kali "the inside of your house is pretty," or something like that, where the existence and character of that "inside space" are being commented on.
Clearly, none of the other specifiers are more appropriate (a, ko, po, hu, etc.), but my question is whether we can do away with the particle altogether in this kind of construction and just say ne sala ka talo ni. In this way, ne sala becomes something of a derived particle of its own, as well as a set adverbial phrase: Ne kea sa ta? Ne sala. This would be similar to Spanish debajo de, or Polish wewnątrz, etc.
I don't see any particular reason not to do this, though it does raise the question of where to draw the line. Can I say, for instance, Ni si ana ka sahi la mama le Mia? for "I gave Mia's mother the wine?" This is approaching the Welsh rule that the possessed noun in a possessive construction is definite by default, and therefore no article is needed.
The thing is that ne sala as a fossilized adverbial phrase is much more relevant, much less marked than la mama. I think for this reason, it feels okay to me to do this in the former case and not in the latter, but I'm bothered by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an absolute criterion to determine where the division should fall.
If frequency/utility/markedness is the issue at hand, though, why do ne talo and la talo sound so awful to me? They seem like ideal candidates for this kind of construction: Ni halu ko mene la talo "I want to go home." Ne kea sa le Iuli? Ne talo le Lopeto. "Where's Julie? At Robert's." Actually, I have no problem at all with these when used in a possessive construction, but on their own...Nea kea sa le Iuli? Ne talo. Hm. I don't know.
It may end up hinging on the semantics of the specifierless noun: ne talo and ne sala are cultural/spatial concepts that have their own general, abstract existence. La mama isn't really in the same boat, at least here in the United States; plus there's something that feels very unique and definite about a mother that makes this difficult for me as well.
Well then. I was hoping to find a definitive answer to this question here, but I don't think it's going to happen just yet. Let's percolate on it.
*One of two ways of referring to "content words" in Koa as of today, the other being "lexemes." I'm not sure which is preferable at this point. These stand in contrast, of course, to the other main Koa word class, particles. A subset of predicates known as "names" constitute something of a third class in that their behavior differs slightly from ordinary predicates.
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