Negating Participles (and Adjectives) in Na'vi + Participles as Predicates

Original question text:

> Prompted by a discussion on our Discord server, I asked Karyu Pawl whether constructions like **ke-<awn>inan-a upxare** (so, negating any participle) would be valid or not, since you can (**kolan**... *could* up until now) negate adjectives productively, which don't already have "separate lexical items" like described here:
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> > To form the negative of an adjective, use the negative prefix ke-. Note, however, that for le- adjectives, \*kele... > kel...  There are also some idiosyncrasies: for example, **keltsunslu** is usually reduced to simply **keltsun**. Also, \*keeyawr > **keyawr** by the general rule that two identical vowels coalesce into one.
> > This is a productive process when there aren't separate lexical items in the dictionary like the ones you pointed out: **tsawl** ~ **hì'i**, **koak** ~ **'ewan**, etc. So there's no \*ketsawl, \*kehì'i, \*kekoak, \*ke'ewan, just as in English we don't have \*unyoung, \*unold, \*unbig, \*unsmall.
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> So here's what KP replied to my initial question about negating participles:
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Original correspondence text:

> Before looking at participles, let's look at ordinary adjectives. Can we in fact negate them easily using ke? I don't remember talking about that, and if I did, I hope I won't be contradicting myself here (please let me know if you discover that I am!), but I don't think of ke + adjective as being freely productive. We have examples like **teng** / **keteng**, **eyawr** / **keyawr**, **fpomronga'** / **kefpomronga'**. But what about \*kelor? \*kenitram? \*ketsawl? etc. I wouldn't think those exist. And notice that the three examples I gave of ke + adj. are all listed in the dictionary. So it seems clear that ke + adj. is not a freely productive mechanism and such forms have to be treated as individual lexical items.
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> Turning now to participles with <awn>, we know that <awn> insertion into transitive verbs IS a productive process -- I can't think of any transitive verbs that don't have <awn> forms. And you're right that these are essentially adjectives. But in the same way that you can't necessarily take any adjective you like and turn it into its opposite by prefixing ke, you shouldn't be able to do that with participles either.
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> There's a parallel situation in English, where Eng. un corresponds to Na'vi ke. We certainly have pairs like seen / unseen, heard / unheard, spoken / unspoken, chosen / unchosen, read / unread, finished / unfinished, and many many more. But can you always do this? Is the process unconstrained? What about unpinched, untorn, unlifted, unironed, unrequired, unpoached, etc. As I wrote those, I got the red squiggle under each one, indicating that Spell Check thought they were not legitimate words. Now it's not at all obvious--at least not to me--which participles can be negated by un and which can't. I have a feeling it's a pretty deep question. But whatever the explanation is, it's clear that you can't freely use un like this; you need to see if the un + participle form is in the dictionary.
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> It seems to me that Na'vi should work the same way.
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> But keep in mind that even if a ke + PART form is not in the dictionary and therefore not a word, you can still get the intended meaning across easily. Even if we don't know whether \*keawninan is a legitimate word (I suspect it's not, given the use of **inan** prior to its adoption as the word for reading written language), we can still talk about unread messages by saying "**upxare a ke lu awninan**." That's only one more syllable than "\*upxare akeawninan."
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> Hope that helps!
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*Originally received on April 20th, 2020*