Change of State

The aspectual system of Qohenje monitors an aspect of semantics which is dealt with quite differently in English. The difference shows up particularly in constructions predicating a change of state. Take the English verb "kill" for instance. This predicates a (dramatic) change of state brought about on some formerly living entity. Qohenje has no verbs with such "state change" meanings, as they would conflict with the aspectual specification necessary on the noun arguments that would be in construction with them. "Kill" means translate from living to dead, and yet "living X" and "dead X" would be different aspects in Qohenje: no way to express the change on a single noun.

The language forms the equivalent of state-change type expressions in a couple of different ways:

"Action with intent" verbs

Qohenje has a semantic set comprising lexemes whose meaning is "carry out some kind of action with a specific goal", where that goal represents a state change for the LM argument. The lexeme is a good example. means "attack with intent to kill". When used with a PT LM, the implication is that the LM ends up dead (i.e. is fully affected in the way that the verbal lexeme proposes). If the LM is AX, then the attempt on its life is understood as unsuccessful:

But of course, this kind of implicature only works with COM aspect on the verbal lexeme. If the verbal predication is not COM, then the outcome of the action is unknown, so the change of state is in fact incomplete:

Note that cannot be marked in the PT case in this context, as the action is predicated as unrealised, and as such no resultng effect can be predicated).

 

"(was X) is Y" expressions

To explicitly state that something has crossed over aspectual categories, expressions like the following are possible:

although context is normally sufficient to render the first part of such expressions redundant. In practice only the current state need be explicitly expressed, allowing the lexical aspect system to do the work.

This last example puts "brother" () in the COM aspect () to indicate "no-longer brother". As this lexeme invaribaly refers to a person, the COM grade indicates that the referent is dead.