Translation pattern of 'to have'?

----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2001 5:51 AM
Subject: Re: Translation pattern of `to have'?


> On 4 March, Jesse Bangs wrote:
>
> >I'm seeing a lot of what seems like
> >syntactic smoke and mirrors propogated, and I have to object.
>
>     An objection, it would appear, is had by Jesse.   ;-)
<snip>

This whole thread reminds me of a running joke in my English class: the
teacher was looking over some essays we had written and noticed a lot of
people had used the passive voice. So, she went into this big spiel about
how it was "ineffective and awkward." :)

So then, every writing I did for about a week included atleast three
glaringly obvious examples of passive voice thrown in on purpose and one day
every transitive verb I spoke in that class was put into the passive voice.
She nearly killed me. :)

But seriously: the sentence "An objection ... is had by Jesse." *does* seem
to me quite awkward, even if it is grammatical, simply because it's in the
passive. It just doesn't "sound" right.

Some of the other phrases in question, "We're having a good time." for
example, seem, to me atleast, to be just idiomatic usage of "to have." In
the case of "We're having a good time," I don't believe any possessing is
going on at all, making it rather irrelevant to the thread. Further, the...
umm, how should I put it... "dirty" interpretation of "having a dog", is
also pretty idiomatic. I wouldn't worry about that either.

Well... my first real post. Whew. I hope I don't sound like an idiot! :p

- Zach May.

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