Re: Standard Average European

Selon Tim Smith <tim.langsmith@...>:

> 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)?
>   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.
>
Actually, context and semantics handle quite a lot of cases (otherwise Japanese
people would spend most of the time misunderstanding each other ;) ). Remaining
cases are handled by not talking in an ambiguous manner (periphrases,
intonation, gestures, etc...).

Moreover, while my comment on a topic-comment word order stands, it doesn't mean
word order is completely free. The topic can always be fronted, but word order
in the comment is not completely free.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.