Re: CHAT: THEORY/CHAT: Re: Jackendoff's "Semantic (?) Structures"

Philippe Caquant said:
>
> I think that a form like "the sodium emitted
> electrons" is, in our cultures anyway, something very
> different, conceptually, from "Bill hit the ball",
> even if the syntax looks exactly the same. It looks
> like we use the same syntactic structure in both cases
> because we have no better choice. It would look heavy
> to say "There was a emission of electrons from the
> sodium source" (although it is possible): it's just
> easier to say "the sodium emitted electrons".
Or, in the Waldzell Conlang, something along the lines of "an event has
occurred in which a sodium atom participated and which has caused an
electron to leave the atom and become part of the atom's environment".

(I'm still fussing with the syntax for this language, but I'll be
publishing something new on the web by the end of May or so.)


> It
> doesn't mean that the concept is the same as in "Bill
> hit the ball". The proof is that "What did the sodium
> do ?" looks very weird.
People play English word games and think they're doing semantics. It's a
sign that linguistic semantics is very immature as a discipline (having
been set back decades by the mainstream belief that syntax and phonology
should be much more important concerns for any linguist).

Of course, people *used* to play English word games and think they were
doing synatx (some still do, in fact). And before that, people played
Latin word games and thought they were doing grammar.

*shrug*

-- Mark

P.S. I used to own a copy of an 18th-century, missionary-written "grammar"
of Herero, a Bantu language spoken in Namibia. We can learn about case
declension of nouns in this "grammar". It turns out that Herero has four
cases, just like German, but that the accusative always has the same form
as the nominative, that the dative is expressed by a preposition meaning
"to" and that the genitive is expressed by a preposition meaning "of". But
yep, it has four cases alright, just like German......