Re: monovalence

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at  5:11 PM, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:49:48AM -0500, Paul Bennett wrote:
>
> > Anyway, I'm having difficulty determining the core argument that makes
> > up the essence of any given verb. You can dig without a tool, for
> > instance, but you have to dig *something*, a hole, a grave or a
> > fortification, or whatever.
>
> My approach to this (and I have given some thought to monovalent-verb-only
> languages) would be to multiply the number of verbs.  If necessary, you
> could have separate dig-with and dig-a verbs, and when desired, say "He
> dig-with shovel dig-a hole" or something.
>
> Or, go with "dig-a" and use "wield" when you need to reference the tool...
I'm going to go something like

person-AGENT hole-dig shovel-TOOL

Of course, word order would be pretty free. I think in this case all six orders would be allowable.

I don't fully understand how I'm going to handle definiteness or gender. Gender
is a prime target for a noun->noun suffix, I suppose, giving

person=(epicene->male)-AGENT hole-dig shovel-TOOL

Then there are various verb->verb promotion and demotion actions that could yield something like

person=(epicene->male)-AGENT shovel-dig=(undergoer->tool) hole-UNDERGOER

Marking the suffixes and their meanings correctly is going to be a big hairy monster,
I suspect. In formatted text, I use smallcaps where I've got caps above, and
superscript where I've got parentheses. That's subject to change at any time.



Paul