To start with, let's look at some problematic sentences, using only syntactic structures we've had up to this point.
1. (ko) ne tia i *kuma "it's hot in here"
2. ko ni lahe i tau "I have to get going"
3. ko ni lu mene i te tai "I might go"
4. a ame i (tai) ne ka talo "there's a bird in the house"
5. ka *uli i ma *uli "it's raining" (cf. Turkish yağmur yağıyor)
There's a problem with all of these, which is that (maybe with the exception of 5) they're all stupid. In theory they could be ways of expressing these concepts, but as the basic unmarked way, they fail. "That I leave is necessary?" I really don't think any natural language is going to structure this kind of statement this way, because it completely ignores pragmatics in striving to retain a syntax identical to that found in unproblematic transitive clauses.
I started to recognize this in an earlier post:
In the main, my concerns [...] pertain to the existential construct in general -- I keep wanting to say something like na tai neko me ni, which is clearly in violation of everything everywhere. I think what's happening is the collision of the logical design of the language with human language intuition; hopefully they won't end up being too difficult to reconcile.
Indeed: so how to resolve this?
One option would be to use the topicalizer to rearrange the sentences into something that feels less silly:
1. *kuma sa ne tia
2. tau sa ko ni lahe
3. te tai sa ko ni lu mene
4. tai sa a ame ne ka talo / a ame sa tai ne ka talo
5. ma *uli sa ka *uli
Some of these feel significantly better at first glance, but only at a rapid first glance, because this doesn't solve anything: these sentences are even more pragmatically anomalous than they were before! Because it's the topicalizer that's allowing me to move the verb up to the front this way, I'm ending up saying things like
1. as for being hot, now, that's what it is in here
2. as for necessary things, now, that's what my leaving is
3. as for possibly being the case, that's the deal with my going
4. existing, now, that's what a bird is doing in the house
5. currently raining, now, that's what the rain is doing
I mean, there may be situations where you'd want to slant things this way. But not for the unmarked sentence frame! Furthermore, this completely fails to address what on Earth we'd do if there were no additional arguments/adjuncts to the clause: "it's hot!", for example. Just kuma? You can imagine a language saying it this way, and I'd like it to be an option for Koa in a very informal sense, but once again not as the basic means of communicating this.
Tok Pisin was, of course, my original inspiration for Koa's basic design, and the way Bislama manages this sort of thing eventually wandered into my mind. They just do away with the subject NP altogether: i gat wan pijin long haos "there's a bird in the house," etc. Is there any reason we can't do this in Koa as well?
1. i *kuma ne tia
2. i tau ko ni lahe†
3. i te tai ko ni lu mene†
4. i me ame ne ka talo OR i tai hu ame ne ka talo
5. i ma *uli
And wow, does that ever work better than anything we've seen before. I can't see any particular problems it would cause at this point, and it gives us a great way of saying i kuma!
2 and 3, though, raise an interesting question: should there be an intonation break after the VP, since the following NP is actually the subject? I.e., i tau, ko ni lahe? I don't want to say yes, because that's not what I'm trying to say: "it's necessary, you know: me going." Once again, it's easy to think of a situation where that would be appropriate, but not as the basic structure.
This is where it hit me: all of the situations where this comes up are intransitive verbs...and I seem to remember from both typology class and Describing Morphosyntax that there's a tendency for SV languages to switch to VS in intransitive clauses (cf. Polish, szła dzieweczka...). What if this is just another allowable syntactic structure in Koa for intransitive verbs?
I think this is sort of like what's called "presentation form" in English: you can say "there is X," "there sits X," etc. In English it starts to feel marginal the further you move from statives: "there sleeps X" "there lives X" are okay but a little weird, but "there eats X" or "there died X" are definitely unacceptable except with humor.
In Koa, though, my philosophy has always been that what you can do to one predicate, you can do to any other. I don't feel comfortable drawing a prescriptive line between which verbs can do this and which can't; theoretically, then, this opens up clauses like i musa po oto "crows are black."
Maybe this could just be limited automatically by speakers' pragmatic instincts. My analysis skills are not sophisticated enough at this point (or maybe I just don't want to think about it that hard right now) to say exactly why, but I feel like po oto i musa is much more appropriate for this statement. And I really hope it's not just because that's how it's done in English.
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