Karere means: Message or news.
kupu.maori.nz gives “He karere māu” (there is a message for you) as an example sentence for this kupu, highlighting that this is a “classifying sentence” which I’m using as a prompt for today’s post.
The determiner ‘he’ is a preposed particle which is used to introduce indefinite phrases and classifying sentences.
An indefinite phrase introduces a noun without referring to a specific instance of that noun, for example:
An important property of the ‘he’ particle is that it can’t follow a preposition (including ‘i’ or ‘ki’) which means it can’t function as the object in a reremahi (active sentence):
We can’t make this into ‘he kiore’ because it follows the ‘i’ joiner, so if we want to say that the cat is going to chase a non-specific rat, there are two other constructions we can use. We can use object incorporation to essentially create a new verb “whai kiore” (rat chasing) allowing us to say:
Alternatively, we can use the passive construction to make the sentence about the rat(s):
In an active sentence, the agent (doer) of the action is the subject phrase and the patient (target) of the action is the object, marked by i/ki.
Because a passive sentence takes the patient as its subject, that patient can be a ‘he’ noun phrase because it’s not introduced by i/ki.
In a passive sentence the subject phrase would generally come before the agent phrase, but they can occur in any order and putting the subject last is common if it’s a ‘he’ phrase. An example of the more common order is:
I won’t cover classifying sentences in detail, but since they’re how I landed on this topic, I’ll close it out by mentioning this other use of ‘he’ briefly.
A classifying sentence states something (called the predicate) about the subject of the sentence. In these simple classifying sentences I’ll mark the predicate with [] and the subject with ():