Re: implicational and factive verbs

On 25 Jan, Roger Mills wrote:

>Daniel Andreasson wrote:
>
>>Replying to my own question. Oh well.
>>
>>A friend of mine sent me this. It seems okay, although he is famous
>>for making the most incredible stuff up, so a word of caution.
>>
>>If he made the below up OTOH, he should get the Nobel Prize
>>in Making Stuff Up. He who sent me this is called P-A. I
>>have no idea who Hans Schröninger is. Hans referred to P-A
>>as Dr. Jande. P-A is _not_ a doctor.
>>
>(snip)  a quick visit to the MIT Press _Cambridge Mass_ did not find any of
>the references.  And I don't think there's another "MIT" in _Camebridge_.
>Confirming my first suspicion that it's (near perfect) linguistic
>gibberish.....;-)
Not to mention the obvious:

> > > > However, when we
> > > > change the verb into the infinitive, this relation changes to the
> > > > opposite. We now have "*Nim eat the banana", which does not in any
> > > > way imply that Nim has caused the banana to change. On the contrary,
> > > > the implication is rather that Nim has not (at least not yet) casued
> > > > the banana to change. The verb "eat" used in the proper context is
> > > > thus an example of an implicative verb.
"Nim eat the banana" either is or is not a grammatical sentence.
If it is, (which of course it isn't), why mark it with an initial star?
If the initial star signifies that it's ungrammatical, the sentence
doesn't imply _anything_ because it's not likely to be used
by a competent English speaker!

    BTW, anyone ever heard of (or _remember_ ;-)  ) the original
"Nim"?  A chimpanzee called "Nim Chimpsky" who was one of
the original volunteers (er, I mean "subjects"  ;-)  ) in the research on
teaching apes to use (human) language. I don't  know whether
the researcher who gave the chimp the name was pro-generative
grammar with a sense of humor or anti-generative grammar with
a grudge. (I seem to recall, though, that it was the former.)

Dan Sulani

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