Predication Strategies

This section will discuss predication as is particularly relevant to adjectives and other modifiers. A discussion of copular clauses is required.

The following is a table with a variety of verbs, both regular and stative, and some that lexically encode meanings prototypically adjectival (such as 'be a lot'):

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All tense and aspect inflections are available to stative verbs. For instance, the present progressive mexe V-aa can be used with any of the above. The following table represents a sampling of inflectional and derivational forms associated with verbs, and illustrates the broad range of predicate types each of these can be used with:

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It is worth noting that, for special derived adjectives such as ciig/jigid/jigdu ‘be tall’, it is the adjectival derived form (jig(i)d, yax(i)g, etc.) rather than any of the others which is most often used in typical verbal inflection paradigms (rather than the root forms ciig, ɓaal, etc).

Copular predication with ka- or ref

Ref is a verb that frequently acts as an existential copula, and works in both predicational and specificational clauses.

<gl id="Specificational" fontsize=12> \gll Obama refu oxe adooxan na USA Obama is-adj pro leader Part USA \trans Obama is the president of the USA. </gl>

(Note: na here is not the relative pronoun, but the partitive preposition. See Noun Modification with -u for more.)

Interestingly, because it is a stative verb, as the sentence above illustrates it can itself become an adjective-type (that is, it can take -u suffix and appear in the same N-adj ordering relation as all other 'adjectives'). When ref takes the form of an -u adjective, this creates an information-structurally marked clause, whereby the noun it 'modifies' is cleft-like or somehow focused (strongly, as in contrastive focus or weakly, as in a regular predicational clause with sentence-focus). The sentence above is better translated as: 'Obama is the one who is president.'

This works well with specificational clauses because if an adjective in Sereer is a word that attributes something to a noun, then 'refu' attributes the existential property to Obama: 'Obama has the property of being (the one who is the president)'

Alternatively, in the following example, ref acts as a regular verb with regular first person inflection:

 refaam oxa ʄiʄ na
 ‘I am a clever one’

In predicational clauses, 'ref' becomes more verb-like:

 mi, o caajang refum      'I am a student.'
 wo, o caajang refo       'You are a student.'
 ten, o caajang arefu     'He is a student.'
 ino, jaajang indefu      'We are students.'
 nuuno, jaajang nundefu   'We are students.'
 deno, jaajang andefu     'They are students.'

However, in this example involving a wh-question ref is an adjective modifying the generic (that is, noun-class-indeterminate) wh-pronoun wum (see the section on Questions for more on wh-pronouns):

 wum ndefu we yaxigna
 ‘Which are the ones that are red?’

In the next example, it's clear that ref can take the full range of modifier morphology, including na-modification:

 fañiik fe refna ondeb	
 ‘the elephant that is small’

 kam ref oxa ʄiʄ na
 ‘I am someone who is clever’

Existential -oo

Oana 05:37, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I think this might actually be a short -o. Discuss. Faytak 01:39, 15 December 2012 (UTC)