Re: HELP: Is this sensible?

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 15:50:34 +0100, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

Thanks, but I've got another question on what you wrote:

[...]
>It depends on how you assign agent and patient.  If the assignment is
>highly lexicalised, you could do anything.
[...]

What do you mean with "lexicalized" here? A specific and grammaticalized
definition of what is agent and what is patient? Well, I don't know if I
handled AGT and PAT like you did up to now, I also followed the definition
that the one who does something is the agent and the one who is affected is
the patient. Nevertheless I think you are right saying that "no-one is in
control of their cleverness" would make sense as well. I would rather tend
to that assignment but if you have a look at the Ayeri grammar (link in the
first mail), you will see adjectives are marked depending on whether their
noun is (agent, ) patient or something else ("oblique"). To make this idea
work in such sentences like in my example "Peter is as clever as Paul", I
decided what I described in that other email: Peter-AGT, Paul-PAT. As I
said, in my opinion, you, Henrik, are more right than me with this. I guess
my idea also won't work with the comparative stuff if I decide to change
things to what Henrik suggested. I already wrote about the comparative
forms before reading Henrik's mail, so you can look up what I mean.

Carsten

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