Koa Update 2: Argument Marking

Continuing to continue our major grammar update!

2. Argument Marking

This is the area where my summer epiphany represents the biggest change to past understanding and usage, as well as the most significant resolution of past woes. I'm both thrilled and almost afraid to announce that we finally have a satisfying, simple, solid system of participant marking, including indefinite participants and their interaction with existentiality.

In a way this is going all the way back to 2003, because I was onto something with my thinking about referentiality that got muddled later on. The muddling was understandable, I think, given my own language background, and intuitive familiarity with languages in which specifiers mush together specificity, definiteness and existential quantification.

The important foundational question is why Koa requires argument marking at all. It's not because definiteness simply must be granularly specified for every participant in order for language to be interpretable, because...Polish, Latin, Malay, Korean, etc. No, arguments have to be marked in Koa because the language is omnipredicative: that marking is the only way we can recover syntactic function in a world where every lexeme can be a noun OR a verb OR an adjective. The marking doesn't have to be a perfect taxonomy of referentiality and discourse stage relationship, it just has to say "hi, this is an argument."

Koa's new system was catalyzed when I recalled that the Samoan article system uses its "the" to mark participants that are referential rather than definite. Whereas English would say "I spent my day lying in bed reading a book" because the book in question is not yet on the discourse stage, Samoan would say "the book" because the speaker is referring to a real, specific book out in the world. It's an elegant system that looks similar to English articles at first glance, but is really quite different.

The most critical fork for Koa now hinges on that same question, which could be put like this: Does the truth value of the proposition depend on the identity of the instance? In other words, is the identity of the referent anchored to a specific individual in the mind of the speaker? Or do there exist many possible referents that could could satisfy the proposition?

This is a spectrum, not a binary. At one pole we have extremely specific, defined referents, as in "my wife is vacationing in Yakutsk"; at the other pole are completely unanchored referents as in "I would like a glass of eau de vie, please." In the middle is a gray area in which individual speakers' judgments may vary. For example, taking a statement like "a mole made a mound in the middle of my prize begonia bed," the speaker could follow this up with

"...I guess I should lay chicken wire under my flower beds next year," OR
"...and when I find it, it will answer for its crimes."

Of course, there was in fact one specific mole that caused the mound under discussion. The relevant information, though, is how the speaker is framing the situation in their mind. In one case the speaker's attention is on the existence of moles in general, unanchored to individuals; in the other, the speaker is focused on the specific -- though as yet unknown -- small mammal against whom they have just conceived a vendetta.

My own personal growth at this point is in the recognition that that gray area is not in fact a design problem I need to spend another 27 years seething about: it's a normal, inevitable scenario in human language use. It's okay that speakers have to make a judgment, that that judgment sometimes depends on inscrutable intuition, and that another speaker might make a different judgment in the same situation.

This sensitivity to the anchored↔︎existential continuum is foundational to Koa's updated argument marking system. Arguments must appear, as mentioned above, with some kind of typing particle or structure:

- a specifier or quantifier
- a relator (which outputs as an adjunctive expression)
- a quantificational expression

Note: Where the theme (technically second variable) of a predication is generic or its specificity is irrelevant or discourse-backgrounded, and the predication as a whole is judged to be a culturally conventional state or event, that predicate may appear without marking: luke tusi "read a book, read books." This is theme incorporation, a valence-reducing operation that satisfies the second argument position in the nuclear expression, and the predicate in question is technically a modifier (see §4.3).

2.1 Specifiers & Quantifiers

This is it, folks -- here are the details of the new system.

Specifiers establish how an argument is anchored, identified, presented, retrieved, named, or questioned within the relevant discourse model. They include:

- ka marks anchored specific referents, agnostic about relationship to the discourse stage. The speaker presents the argument as a particular contextually anchored instance, regardless of whether the addressee can identify it. Note that this no longer has anything directly to do with definiteness! Though "the" may often be the most natural English translation, ka does not operate on the same semantic axis as the English definite article.

- ti marks either deictic proximity or presentational/cataphoric reference. It directs attention toward an entity being presented now; it may therefore refer to something physically or conceptually close to the speaker or current discourse point ("this book here in front of me") or introduce a referent that will be important in later discourse ("this guy walks into a bar").

- to marks either deictic distance, or anaphoric retrieval (preexistence on the discourse stage). It directs attention toward an entity already situated away from the current point of introduction; as such, in addition to representing "that" in a distal sense, it is also the closest Koa now comes to an actual definite article: "the referent already present on the discourse stage."

- le marks names (§1.2.6).

- ke marks an open interrogative argument whose identity is being requested.

Quantifiers, on the other hand, determine the extent to which a predicate’s domain is instantiated or selected. Unlike specifiers, they do not anchor the argument to a particular referent. Quantifiers and specifiers may occur together (see §2.2 below), as they're operating on different semantic dimensions. These include:

- a, the existential quantifier, introduces one or more unanchored instances satisfying the predicate. The speaker suggests that there is, may be, or must be at least one instance satisfying this predicate without selecting a particular one. Again, this is no longer about indefiniteness, though it may sometimes coincide with the use of the English indefinite article.

- po, the universal quantifier, selects the whole relevant extension of a predicate or presents it as a class, kind or generic domain. It refers to the instantiation of the predicate generically, or to all members of a contextually restricted set.

- co, the unrestricted or free-choice quantifier, selects any arbitrarily chosen member of the relevant domain: the identity of the selected member explicitly does not matter.

The places where this may feel most counterintuitive to a person with an existing Koa background (i.e. probably only me and Robert) will be in situations like

a with a mass noun:
a vua i pahu la lavi ka iku "(some) rain fell through the window"

a with plurals:
ni mupahu a kina la kuvu "I dropped (some) pens on the ground"

ka with indefinite-feeling referents:
ka mina ni i soi me simi "A friend of mine called on the phone"

It's going to take some getting used to for sure. But -- now, kind of amazingly, and for the very first time, it's easy and clear to understand exactly what each particle really means! There are judgment calls, but not definitional confusion, and no unnecessarily granular distinctions. AND we've escaped the chronicle of indefinite referent miseries...by simply stepping away. It turns out that indefiniteness qua indefiniteness is not really that important to mark explicitly after all.

2.2 Operator Nesting / Scope layering

There is a bit more to the show here, because specifiers and quantifiers can also stack. When a quantifier scopes an argumental expression already marked by a specifier, it takes on a more literal quantificational meaning:

a ka sona "some of the ducks"
a ti sona "some of these ducks"
a to sona "some of those ducks"

po ka sona "all of the ducks"
po ti sona "all of these ducks"
po to sona "all of those ducks"

If we don't want to anchor "some" and "all" to a contextual set -- just "some ducks" (out of all the ducks there are) or "all ducks" (period) -- there are a couple options. We can use a and po on their own, for light quantification:

a sona i miku "some ducks are complicated / there are complicated ducks"
po sona i miku "ducks are complicated (as a class)"

...but if we really want to lean into the quantification, we'll need help from an additional lexical predicate: visi "all, every" and ioko "a set, some" (and see §2.6 for further discussion). These can either follow the argument as a modifier, or become a quantificational expression with pi:

a sona ioko i miku "there are some ducks that are complicated"
ioko pi sona i miku "some ducks are complicated"

po sona visi i miku "every duck is complicated"
visi pi sona i miku "all ducks are complicated"

The semantic difference between the options in each case is very small. If we really drill down, the expressions with a and po are focusing attention more on the predication (i.e. being complicated), whereas the expressions with ioko pi and visi pi are focused on the quantity: some ducks, all ducks. In actual usage, though, these essentially represent equivalent alternatives.

Of course, there are also basic quantificational expressions like the following:

poli pi sona "a lot of ducks"
aiva pi sona "quite a few ducks"
nai pi sona "as unspecified number of ducks"
neso pi sona "some smallish number of ducks"
tele pi sona "several ducks"
vaha pi sona "not many ducks, few ducks"

toa pi sona "that many ducks"
kea pi sona? "how many ducks?"

See §6.1 for discussion of interactions between relators and argument marking.

2.3 Compound Proforms (Correlatives)

Argument markers also join together to create compound pronominal forms analogous to the correlatives of Esperanto. The first component of these forms indicates deixis, quantification or interrogative status, and the second distinguishes unanchored from anchored/human reference. These are somewhat lexicalized and -- clearly -- not 100% reflective of the individual meanings of the components.

	unanchored	anchored/human
what/which	kea “what”	keka “who/which one”
this	tia “this, all this”	tika “this one”
that	toa “that, all that”	toka “that one”
some	aha, aa “something”	aka “someone/some of them”
any	coa “anything”	coka “anyone/any of them”
all	poa “everything”	poka “everyone/all of them”
none	naha, naa “nothing”	naka “no one/none of them”

Sadly, our long-standing correlatives with hu (hua "something," nahua "nothing," etc.) are no more. I like hua rather more than aha, but as it's probably ridiculous to retain it as an alternative, I've found a new use for it (see §2.6!).

The other class of compound proforms are pronominal predicates, formed by reduplicating the corresponding pronominal particle:

nini "I"
sese "you"
tata "he/she/it"
nunu "we"
soso "you all"
tutu "they"

Pronominal predicates deserve a longer discussion than I'm going to give them here. Essentially, they are used either when a nuclear function is needed syntactically (tika i nini "this one is me," e.g. in a photograph) or for stress, emphasis or contrast (ana ta la nini, na la tata "give it to me, not to him").

As mentioned previously in §1.2.5, all these forms are exceptional in being licensed for argumental distribution without an argument marker. The only circumstances in which they might appear with a specifier or quantifier might be e.g.

oo he ko ni sano to aha -- halu ko lolo ka molo se
"oh when I say that something -- I wanna hold your hand"

ai se aima ka pacoi ni? ia, ka sese i ce koa i taa ka nini
"do you like my drawing? yes, yours is much better than mine"

2.4 Existential Structures

Along with "indefinite participants," expressing existence has historically been another of the abject intractables. Part of this was due to gaps in the description/understanding of the argument marking system that made forms with a feel insufficient. In general, though, I've also had very low tolerance for there being more than one way to do anything unless the selection criteria were minutely defined.  This blind spot now feels quite quaint -- multiple overlapping syntactic options obviously need not bespeak a design failure.

Existence in Koa, then, can be expressed in any of three ways: through existential quantification with a, with the predicate tai "exist, obtain," or via a comitative structure with me. The differences between these three strategies are highly discourse-sensitive.

With a (and compound proforms with a- as the first component), the least marked strategy, the existential force is present but neutral, with discourse orientation towards the figure under discussion:

ai a vitu i ne ka noni?
"is a dragon / are (some) dragons in the mountains?"
"is there a dragon / are there dragons in the mountains?"

ni halu ko sano se aha
"I want to tell you something"
"there's something I want to tell you"

Other quantifiers produce related existential interpretations with a locative nucleus. po takes the predicate generically or as a class, while co, in interrogative and negative contexts, gives an unrestricted "any at all" sense.

ai po vitu i ne ka noni?
"are (there) dragons (as a class) in the mountains?"
"do dragons occur in the mountains?"

ai co vitu i ne ka noni?
"are (there) any dragons (at all) in the mountains?"

Using tai as the clause nucleus makes existence explicit and at issue. Again all three quantifiers may appear, with different semantics:

ai a vitu i tai ne ka noni?
"does a dragon / do (some) dragons exist in the mountains?"
"is there a dragon / are there (some) dragons in the mountains?"

ai po vitu i tai ne ka noni?
"do dragons (as a class) exist in the mountains?"

"do there exist dragons in the mountains?"
"do dragons occur in the mountains?"

ai co vitu i tai ne ka noni?
"do any dragons at all exist/occur in the mountains?"
"are there any dragons at all in the mountains?"

Lastly, (i) me, literally "be with, have" is more setting-oriented or presentational:

ai (i) me vitu ne ka noni?
"are there dragons in the mountains (that we're talking about)?"
"in the mountains, are there dragons?"

po may optionally quantify the existential argument, emphasizing a generic reading; co is also possible:

ai (i) me po vitu ne ka noni?
"are there dragons (as a class) in the mountains (under discussion)?"

ai (i) me co vitu ne ka noni?
"are there any dragons (at all) in those mountains?"

These structures with me can also be rephrased with the setting as an overt first argument, in contexts where that setting is particularly topical:

ai ka noni i me vitu?
"do the mountains (that we're talking about) have dragons?"
"are there dragons in those mountains (that we're talking about)?"

2.5 Negative Existentials & Concord

Here's another imponderable that we can resolve at last. In general, the unmarked preference is for negative polarity to be established as early as possible in the clause; after this, negative concord is accepted but not required:

Without concord:
naka i tule "no one came/there was no one who came"
na a vitu i ne ka noni "there are no dragons in the mountains"
ni na ana aka aha "I didn't give anybody anything"

With concord:
naka i na tule "no one came/there was no one who came"
na a vitu i na ne ka noni "there are no dragons in the mountains"
ni na ana naka naha "I didn't give anybody anything"

I hesitate to say that expressions with negative concord may be read as somewhat more emphatic than those without. That would be reasonable, but in a language intended to be used by speakers from any language background, I don't want to force that interpretation.

Negative force arriving via a later negative constituent is possible, and interpretable, but would be very marked:

Neutral: ni na sano a mea mono "I didn't say a single thing"
Marked: ni sano na a mea mono "I said not a single thing"

One thing to call out for historical Koanists (Koaists? Koalogists??) is the negative quantifier na a, previously nahu. I waver on whether the two morphemes can be written together since naa also exists independently with the meaning "nothing." Written spacing conventions have also clearly gone back to the drawing board, though -- see §7 -- so we'll take this on definitively a little later.

2.6 Disambiguation & Emphasis

In addition to the argument markers discussed so far that provide the structurally scaffolding semantics of quantification, referentiality and discourse operations, additional emphasis and disambiguation in these areas are available via lexical predicates.

Quantification

Here the qualifying predicate may either follow the argument in question as a modifier, precede it in a quantificational expression or, when a postnuclear argument is quantified, may follow the clausal arguments as a serial verb (see §3.3):

ioko "some; a set"
a asi ioko i vihe OR ioko pi asi i vihe
 "some ideas are green"

visi "all, every"
po kunu visi i va mene la ka lani OR visi pi kunu i va mene la ka lani
"all dogs go to heaven"

sai "whole, entire"
ai se ia suo ka kulo sai? "did you really eat the whole bowl?" OR
ai se ia suo sai pi ka kulo? "did you really eat all of the bowl?" OR
ai si ia suo ka kulo i sai? "did you really eat the bowl in its entirety?"

hetu "any, at all"
ai se suso co iki hetu? OR
ai se suso hetu pi iki? OR
ai se suso co iki i hetu?
"did you kiss any frogs at all?"

Discourse

hua "some, a certain" can either reinforce an introduction to the discourse stage when modifying a relational argument with ti or ka:

vo ka/ti kúnika hua i si asu ne...
"once there lived a certain king..." lit. "behold a/this certain king lived there"

manu "present, aforementioned, that we are talking about" reinforces the retrieval of an existing referent from the discourse stage:

ala ea lai la ka kepe manu
"but let us return to the topic at hand"

Specificity

aha "of some kind" lit. "something" and again hua "some, a certain" reinforce nonspecificity with the existential quantifier a:

a hili aha/hua i li si iune ka sie nu visi
"some mouse seems to have stolen all our cheese"

litu "particular, specific, the very" reinforces specificity:

vo ka kane litu i tule, u nu ma puhu
"here comes the very man we were speaking of"

laca "general" reinforces a generic interpretation:

po vitu laca i asu ne to noni
"dragons do generally dwell in those mountains"

Number

Since Koa arguments are not morphologically marked for plurality, overt number can be emphasized by mono "only, singular" or ena "one" for singular, or eli "various, several" for plural:

ai se nae a kúhuto ne ka pese?
"do you see an owlet/some owlets in the nest?"

a kúhuto ena/mono i ne ka pese
"there is one/a single owlet in the nest"

a kúhuto eli i ne ka pese
"there are several/plural owlets in the nest"

...and that wraps up Section 2! Next up will be predicators and clauses, which will let us close the books on complement clauses at long last. Stay tuned...