Re: verbs of eating

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 03:36:27PM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > While it's in another thread, I'll also mention that "sell" is a
> > four-place verb [in Lojban]: A sells B to C at price D.  This also serves
> for "buy"
> > (C buys B from A at price D), "is the price of" (D is the price from A
> > of B for C), and "cost" (vb) (B costs (from A for B) C), with appropriate
> > particles or their equivalent prefixes.
> >
> Those certainly capture the essential meanings of buy and sell; but can't D
> "price" in both cases be omitted if it's of no concern/irrelevant/unknown?
> That's why I don't feel "price" is a core argument of these verbs, any more
> than time ("yesterday") or place ("at an auction") is.
One may also say that the seller isn't a core argument, since under
certain circumstances the important thing is *what* was sold rather than
who sold it. The seller would be of no concern, and perhaps even unknown.
For example, a manager at a departmental store would be concerned about
the exact items sold, but would not care very much about which salesperson
effected the sale. Requiring the mention of the salesperson each time
would be as redundant and unnecessary as repeating "at the auction" or
"yesterday" in your example.

Of course, in English, omitting the seller requires a passive verb, but
semantically the verb is the same, it's merely lacking one of its
arguments.

> Let's see, how about "trade, swap"-- that would need
> 1. the person trading "I"
> 2. the thing offered in trade "(my) car"
> 3. the person traded to "Bill"
> 4. the thing received in trade "(Bill's) motorcycle"--
> another 4-place predicate, but #3 is easily omissible.
>
> Or maybe "trade" is more complex, since it involves both giving and
> receiving objects. (I have no idea how it would be specified in Fillmore's
> terms; I don't recall that he handled double objects (car/motorcycle) at
> all......)
I'd say that verbs have a higher valency than what we'd normally think of,
but its arguments may be omitted as long as the final meaning is clear. So
in one case, the thing offered in trade can be omitted, but in another
case, it is required but the thing received in trade is omitted. There
need not be a linear ordering in what can be omitted from a verb's
arguments, IMHO.


T

--
Fact is stranger than fiction.