Re: modals tagging selbri question...

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

Trevor wrote:
> But it seems to be implied in the explanations of modals that i can say
> .i mi ka'e citka vau
> and have it mean "I can eat." -- this doesn't seem right to me.  This
> seems to express "I (able)ly eat."

I think you're generalizing incorrectly from tanru to modals.
With tanru, the first one modifies the second one in the way
you describe -- for example "mi kakne citka vau" would
mean "I ablely eat".

But with modals it works almost the other way around; you can
think of the selbri as modifying *them*, in a way.  "mi ka'e
citka" describes a capability; "mi pu'o citka" describes
something that is fixin' to happen (which might not actually
come to pass); "mi na'e citka" describes something
other than eating.  I think the modals are all pretty
consistent this way: "mi <modal> citka" is not necessarily
a kind of eating.

--
                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  http://www.quetzal.com
 Boulder, CO          \/   cbogart@quetzal.com