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Not to be confused with "repetitive," Google! >.< [+fists, +air]

I was studying an Ida'an grammar and came across this out of the blue:

Petitives are formed by attaching the discontinuous affix məkə(k)- -i- to a stem⁴.
...
⁴ If the first vowel of the root is /i/ this infix is inaudible. The infix -i- marks Completive
Aspect if used in isolation or in other combinations, but in petitives the -i- infix does not seem
to add any meaning to the verb.

Along with some glosses:

aus ‘bring’ məkəkeus ‘request to bring’
ulan ‘load’ məkəkilan ‘request to load’

So, the gloss is clear enough, but it's too small to say what else is going on. I can't decide if it's a mood or a voice (since it immediately follows the causative, it might be related?). Obviously, my google-ninja is not on top of the game, so has anyone else seen this and care to enlighten me? My guess is it's a voice, because I'm pretty sure a mood already exists. If it helps, these guys are Dutch; that might influence their choice of terminology.

Peti.. tion?

And why does it matter which of T/A/M/V/etc it is?

Sounds like another term for precative mood.

And I would echo that it seems likely they derived the term from "petition."

I agree that this "petitive" is a precative mood, and not a voice.

Voices are operations that rearrange or otherwise specify something about the mapping of semantic roles (e.g. agent, patient) to syntactic roles (e.g. subject, direct object) in a clause. They also commonly alter the pragmatic statuses of the rearranged referents (like making the "patient" the topic of a sentence, in passives). The "petitive" operation above does not seem to do any of this.

Whereas moods express something about the truth value of the proposition, or the speaker's degree of commitment to its truth value (e.g. an irrealis clause is, fundamentally, one which the speaker is not necessarily claiming to be true). Moods also commonly convey an illocutionary force at the same time (e.g. to use a permissive mood is to grant permission, to use a precative mood is to perform a request, and so forth). The "petitive" operation above does seem to do all of these things.

Okuno wrote:If it helps, these guys are Dutch; that might influence their choice of terminology.

That helps a lot. Googling for "petitieve modaliteit" turns up as second hit "(...), petitieven (iemand om iets vragen), (...)", translated "petitives (asking someone for something".


JAL

heheh... somehow I've never broken up petition into peti-tion <.< It seems more obvious now.

"petitieve modaliteit," eh? I'm pretty sure modaliteit is more a cognate with modality than voice... just going out on a limb there. Good to se it exists somewhere, anyway.

Although, it's interestingly different from modality, because ~200 pages later the authors finally get around to showing off the petitive in full sentences. Things look really slippery, but it seems the "causee" (requested person) is an indirect object, and the "causer" (requester) and "causand" are marked in some other way: I think the requester takes the actor-case. It's hard to say without commiting the entire grammar o memory T.T Regardless, the authors clearly state they're examining transitive verbs and are also clearly considering three verb arguments, which obviously implies a valence-change.

I may just end up going with modality and voice as both being marked here. Seems the most straightforward, esp. with Radius' definitions.

Okuno wrote:"petitieve modaliteit," eh? I'm pretty sure modaliteit is more a cognate with modality than voice...

If not a direct translation/borrowing. It's not voice, but at least the "petetive", whether a voice or a modality, turns up in Dutch linguistic studies.


JAL

If it involves a valency-changing operation, it makes sense to call it a voice.

YngNghymru wrote:If it involves a valency-changing operation, it makes sense to call it a voice.

Indeed. And if it functions more or less like something else called a "petitief", albeit a mood, it makes sense to call it the "petitive". But it seems a very rare term, and the difference with the precative is unclear.


JAL

Peto, petere to seek...
Or to attack, although that seems a bit aggressive for a mood.

"I'm in an aggressive mood" :)


JAL