Self-termination

Revision as of 22:14, 17 February 2023 by Laqme (talk | contribs) (Lynn moved page Auto-terminating clauses to Self-termination)
This page was written for Toaq Gamma. Its contents are not yet up to date with the latest version of Toaq, Toaq Delta.

It has been proposed that Toaq could have auto-terminating clauses.

The idea is that you don't need to say cy when a subclause verb has all its arguments filled.

You know that the next argument must belong to the outer clause, because the inner clause can't take any more arguments.

Mẻoca lôı súq nháo jí.
The fact that you hate them saddens me.

It would be ungrammatical for to be a third argument to loı, which is "full" — so it must be a second argument to meoca.

Adverbial auto-termination

One extension would be to allow ending a subclause by saying an adverbial:

Mẻoca fâ súq bũ jí.
The fact that you don't go saddens me.

After , it would be ungrammatical for to be a further argument fa, as adverbials must come either before or after all the arguments. Thus, we can interpret a post-argument adverbial as terminating the clause.