Purpose and result clauses

This is, at last, a review of the means Koa has developed to express the intended or actual effect of an action, structures which have been decided and in use for at least two years now and awaiting their moment in the sun.

One expresses these semantics via at least three entirely distinct syntactic structures, of which the simplest is the serial verb construction (speaking of long awaiting formal description). Most of the heavy lifting heretofore, though, has been courtesy of oblique nominal clauses -- known in this usage for many years -- and adverbial clauses, much more recently understood.

(Aside: I'm experiencing some onomastic frustration as I try to use English-language grammatical terminology to describe clause-level Koa syntactic structures, and had already written a multi-paragraph excursus before realizing it wasn't really going to be helpful in understanding the subject at hand. Perhaps I should flesh it out into a post of its own...)

Let's compare each type of result clause to the corresponding purpose clause to make the structures and meaning conveyed as clear as possible. First, with oblique nominal clauses:

1A. ta-talu le_Kéoni me ko ta-sulu
3SG-push John COM NOM.CL 3SG-collapse
"he pushed John over," lit. "he pushed John with him falling down"

1B. ta-talu le_Kéoni la ko ta-sulu
3SG-push John ALL NOM.CL 3SG-collapse
"he pushed John to knock him down," lit. "he pushed John for him falling down"

In 1A the structure uses the comitative me "with" to specify the outcome of the action -- John falling down -- whereas 1B uses the allative la "to/for" to express only the intention, with the actual result remaining unexplored.

I was nervous about these structures for a long time in fear that they might be importing unexamined IE calques, but with further thought I realized that this is in fact an extremely common strategy cross-linguistically (in both Spanish and Turkish, for instance).

In the examples above, note that there is a bit of theoretical ambiguity in the intended referent of ta in tasulu: 1A could also potentially mean "he pushed John and fell down." In general, however, subject particles in an embedded clause are omitted when coreferential with the subject of the matrix clause, so with that meaning we would expect to see instead tatalu le Kéoni me ko Ø-sulu. In practice, of course, context would also strongly inform the interpretation.

An exhaustive post on the form and use of adverbial clauses is urgently needed and long overdue, and this discussion anticipates that core understanding a bit. Here are the same parallel expressions using this construction:

2A. ta-talu le_Kéoni ve ta-sulu
3SG-push John ADV.CL 3SG-collapse
"he pushed John over," lit. "he pushed John such that he fell down"

2B. ta-talu le_Kéoni ve ta-cu-sulu
3SG-push John ADV.CL 3SG-IRR-collapse
'he pushed John to knock him down," lit. "he pushed John such that he would fall down"

Note that the only difference between 2A and 2B is that in 2B the result clause contains the irrealis cu: thus the described outcome is hypothetical, and expresses only intention. I really quite love this new (well, newish -- 2023 still feels recent) addition to my understanding of how Koa can work, informed by languages as distinct as Latin, Basque and Nahuatl!

Interestingly, a very small change in both example sets completely changes the parsing and introduces additional distance between the action and result (and/or between agent and patient):

1A'. ta-talu me [ le_Kéoni ko sulu ]
3SG-push COM [ John NOM.CL collapse ]
"he pushed, and John fell down"; "he pushed such that John fell down"

2A'. ta-talu [ le_Kéoni ve sulu ]
3SG-push [ John ADV.CL collapse ]
idem

The distinction in meaning is similar to that between "he killed John" and "he caused John to die." Formally, the difference hinges on the location of the brackets: whether the subject of the result clause is felt to be a patient of the matrix verb. Thus

2A. ta-talu le_Kéoni ve [ ta-sulu ]
3SG-push John ADV.CL [ 3SG-collapse ]
"he pushed John over," lit. "he pushed John such that he fell down"

2A'. ta-talu [ le_Kéoni ve sulu ]
3SG-push [ John ADV.CL collapse ]
"he pushed, and John fell down"; "he pushed (something) such that John fell down"

Lastly, and in a fashion perhaps most natively Koa of all of these, we may use serial verbs to express the same meaning. Thus

3A. ta-talu le_Kéoni i sulu
3SG-push John SV fall
"he pushed John over," lit. "he pushed John fall down"

3B. ?ta-talu le_Kéoni i vi-sulu
3SG-push John SV IMP-fall
"he pushed John to knock him down," lit. "he pushed John let him fall down!"

3A is basic and the lightest of all available options for this semantic: a Koa speaker would likely select it unless there was a reason to prefer the greater specificity or wordiness of 1A or 2A in context. I left this construction for last, though, because the parallel form for intention, 3B, is...questionable.

Prior to my discovery of the incredible potential of ve via Nahuatl near the end of 2023, the usage of the imperative in 3B was suggested by Latvian in June; I still don't really know what to think of it and whether it makes any sense at all. I honestly don't like it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be available...but then again there really hasn't ever been any other similar use of vi anywhere else in the language. AND I still feel weird about new modal morphology showing up late in string of serial verbs. I don't want to nix it outright, but it feels very marginal to me.

As I mull this over, I find myself wondering whether in fact 3A could indicate either result or intention depending on context. Is that possible? All of my sense of this comes either from dipping my toes into Bislama or my native speaker intuition (such as it is) from Koa -- why don't I actually speak any natural languages that use serial verbs? What have I been doing with my life??

Okay, breathing: lots more research is clearly needed, and I have some papers touching this topic queued up to review, but in the mean time I'm finding examples via Google like this one from Mandarin:

tā tuō xié jìn wū
she take.off shoe enter house
"she took off her shoes to enter the house" OR "she took off her shoes and entered the house"

For the moment, then, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that Koa could use serial verbs in the same way -- that's rather exciting! I'm going to let that percolate over the next little while. I suspect that serial verbs may end up obviating the need in everyday usage for a lot of the syntactically complex constructions that have caused me the most angst over the years...

Before closing for today, I should mention one other type of result construction: so X that Y. The Koa formula for this is iu X ve Y, as in, for example,

ta-iu-ona ve (ta-)sulu
3SG-DEG-drunk ADV.CL (3SG-)collapse
"she was so drunk she fell down"

This dates from as far back as 2017, surprisingly, long before I had any clear sense of what ve was really all about. It now occurs to me that we could also achieve the same meaning with serial verbs, e.g.

ta-iu-ona i sulu
1SG-DEG-drunk SV collapse
"she was so drunk she fell down," lit. "she's so drunk fall down"

...and we can go ahead and disallow the imperative construction from 3B, creative idea though it was.

Since purpose clauses come up a whole lot in daily usage, I'd like to sum up our three strategies, in reverse order, for saying "I went home to take a nap":

nimene lakoto i núkuki
I.went home SV nap
lit. "I went home nap"

nimene lakoto ve cu-núkuki
I.went home ADV.CL IRR-nap
lit. "I went home that I might nap"

nimene lakoto la ko núkuki
I.went home ALL NOM.CL nap
lit. "I went home for napping"

In terms of usage, the serial verb construction is once again by far the simplest/lightest/most elegant and I would imagine we would see it most often colloquially -- not that serial verbs are necessarily coded as casual in Koa usage, though, so much as that the others may be coded as formal! For those other two, I really just don't know at this point: are there any pragmatic implications that could differentiate? Or could this be like someone versus somebody where there is genuinely no meaningful difference, just personal preference? The ve structure feels vaguely more sophisticated to me, but that may just be interference from English!

Perhaps I should try to translate something more...not actually written for small children, to create the opportunity to try out all the structures I've ended posts about by saying "We'll have to consider as this comes up in context." I wonder what? It needs to be short enough not to be overwhelming, but long enough to sink my teeth into. It would be neat if it were in a language other than English, too.