Re: A question about space tenses

["Jorge J. Llambias" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

Iain Alexander wrote:
[...]
> Perhaps, but it looks like we're stuck with using the gismu
> {farna} for that.
I don't know how stuck we are. There are two separate issues
at stake:

(1)- Whether fa'a means "oriented towards X" or "located towards X".
(And similarly for to'o, oriented or located away from X.)

(2)- Whether mo'i is to be used to show movement of the event as a
whole or movement of some sumti of the relationship.

As far as (1) goes, the baselined refgrammar isn't decisive. It has
no examples using fa'a or to'o, and the short definitions it gives
can be interpreted either way. The definition lojbab gave is also
ambiguous, and though the explanation he gives obviously refers to
the location definition, I think it would be worth going back to
the original orientation one. (The origin of fa'a is from farna,
clearly, and that is even in the refgrammar.)

As for (2), I'm not overly concerned, since I dislike both
possibilities. Making mo'i show the movement of one sumti is
inconsistent with how the rest of the tenses work. Making it
show the movement of the whole event (in an airplane, train,
elevator, or whatever) is rather silly. It is not something
that I would want to specially grammaticalize. So I am not
likely to be using mo'i in any case. (The refgrammar in this
case has examples for each of both interpretations.)

Jorge