Sargaĺk Participles and their Use

I previously outlined the semantics and the morphology of the Sargaĺk participles. This post sets out to describe their syntax and their pragmatics.

Participles often serve a role comparable to relative subclauses in English. However, the strategy used to express similar ideas usually is one of using different styles of subordinated coordination: when the x was swimming, rather than the swimming x. The three voices of the participles enable some relative-clause-like structure for subjects, objects and recipients of the embedded verb.

Topics tend to prefer the use of separate, subordinate clauses.

An exhaustive list of "general" traits of which one to pick would be:

• "heavy" embedded VPs are more often rendered as subclauses than by participles
• "heavy" clauses with an additional subclause that could be rendered by a participle often have participles rather than an additional subclause
• topics prefer subclauses
• focus prefers participles
• certain participles form compound-like lexical structures, and these form an inseparable unit with their head noun. These generally have very full case congruence, and their evidentiality is inferential*. Examples include
• "xalval ecdo", sweating house or house that sweats, essentially 'sauna'. xalval is not a gerund or anything like that; to some extent, this is a sort of implicit causative, 'house that sweats (you)'.

Beyond the use of participles as attributes in NPs, we have the use of participles with auxiliaries. Participles can be combined with the copula to form statements a bit like "X is verbing Y". The binary copula is only used when emphasizing a positive answer to a yes-no-question. Other than that, the copula-construction is almost always used when the subject is the focus. Thus, a focused subject enforces evidentiality marking in its VP.

Objects and recipients too can, by voice markings on the participle, be marked in this way, but this is somewhat less common.

A handful of auxiliaries require participles:

sanət - be [reputed to/inferred to/seen to/heard to/...] verbThis requires the active form of the present or past participle. (Uninflected). This auxiliary basically emphasizes the content of the evidentiality marker.

xk'arp- - resume

mər- continue

mərmər- continue despite attempts by others to stop one from doing

tomŕ- cease (participle in the ablative)

Further, a lot of verbs lack some participle forms, e.g. verbs of perception often lack  non-primary perception evidentiality forms, verbs of verbal interaction often lack everything but second-hand forms, etc. For some of these, this is more of a conflation of forms, for others it seems more like an actual gap. Lack of past or present forms, or of passive or recipient forms is also not unusual.

Finally, there exists an adverbial case that only exists for participles. This signifies by doing. Its marker is -(k)o, which also reduces the previous syllable's vowel if morphophonologically possible. This conflates a fair share of forms as well.