Re: Standard Average European

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:02 AM, Tim Smith <tim.langsmith@...> wrote:
> Very interesting. This pretty much agrees with some stuff I've read elsewhere,
> but it's good to see it confirmed by a native speaker. But I do wonder about
> one thing: with a transitive verb, how do you tell the subject from the
> object, if they aren't distinguished by word order as in written French
> (assuming that both arguments are third person, and have the same gender and
> number, so the agreement prefixes (or proclitic pronouns, or whatever you
> choose to call them) won't disambiguate them)?
Could you give some examples? I can't think of any off the top of my
head and without examples I'm actually quite confused as to what
you're asking.

> I realize that in the majority of cases, the context and/or the semantics of
> the nouns themselves will be such that only one of the two grammatically
> possible interpretations makes sense, but I would think that there must be a
> fairly large residuum of situations where that doesn't work.
>
> - Tim
>
>

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