Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're pointless
| From: | Mike Ramsay <mike.ramsay@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, December 9, 1998, 17:04 |
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Nik scribeva:
(snippage)
[Joshua]
>> I have yet to meet someone who could explain just what the distinction
between
>> nouns, verbs, and adjectives is supposed to represent;
>
>Nouns are objects, adjectives are properties, verbs are actions. It's
>as simple as that, at least as far as prototypes go.
>
>There are certain concepts that don't fit into any of these prototypes
>perfectly, these are the ones that may differ from language to language,
>being forced into one or another catagory. For example, English usually
>uses verbs for weather phenomena (e.g., "it's raining"), while other
>languages use nouns ("there is rain", "rain is falling"). I'm guessing
>that some use adjectives ("it is rainy"), but I don't know of any
>specific languages that do that. The existence of non-prototypical
>examples does not make the concepts themselves any less valid, or
>"artificial, sloppy, or unnecessary", any more than the fact that there
>is no such thing as a perfectly isolating, or perfectly agglutinating
>language invalidates those concepts.
Very true, certain prototypes have ranges with indistinct boundaries.
They have central representations that are clearly examples of, say,
a verb, with more and more variation as you go out from this center.
At the edges, you would have, say, functions that are served by verbs
in some languages but nouns or adjectives in others. In the middle,
you have functions served by verbs across the board (at least in the
languages that the range covers).
Prototypicamente,
Mike R
(This isn't necessarily Interlingua theory, by the way. It's just
my understanding of the prototype concept _in general_.)