Language Contact and Documentation: Contacto Linguistico y Documentacion

Putting oral narratives into writing 335
‘you have searched for lice (on my head and) made me fall asleep.’
(Vae_01R.123)
(11) b. Mataa te- a veve usu va-goro-goroho anaa
good prep- art search lice caus-red-seep 1sg.obj
‘Thank you for searching for lice (on my head and) making me fall
asleep.’
(Vae_01E.093)
In the next example, the second clause of the oral version (12a) contains a
relative clause modifying the subject a taba ‘the thing’.
(12) a. na baitono bona a taba na kara- karas nana
tam hear 4sg art thing tam red-scratch 3sg.ipfv
‘(she) heard it, the thing was scratching’
to kokopo nana nahu, …
rel cover 3sg.ipfv pot
‘(that thing) that (she) kept covered in the pot, …’
(Iar_02R.046)
Since the subject a taba ‘the thing’ is abandoned in the nominalisation (12b),
its relative clause is lost as well, but the editor expresses its content by an
attributive locative phrase komana nahu kepaa vai ‘inside this clay pot’ which
modifies the nominalised verb karasi ‘scratching’.
(12) b. me=paa baitono bona si karasi
and=tam hear art dim scratch
‘and (she) heard a little scratching’
koma-n=a
nahu kepaa vai
inside-3sg.poss-=art pot clay dem
‘inside this clay pot’
(Iar_02E.012)
5.2.3 Ditransitive constructions
In Teop verbs denoting actions that are performed with an instrument can take
a second object referring to the instrument (Mosel 2010b). This syntactic pattern
allows the editors to merge a sequence of two clauses of the structure
‘Agent takes Instrument and affects Patient’ into a single ditransitive clause of
the structure ‘Agent affects Patient with Instrument’.