Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

On Apr 29, 2004, at 6:37 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:
>> Philippe Caquant scripsit:
>>> No, really, I cannot feel it this way, although it's
>>> hard for me to explain exactly why, especially in
>>> English. I just feel that a "dog" is perceived as an
>>> entity (a thing of its own), while "a thing that is
>>> brown" is not [and yet, when you think of a dog, you
>>> probably imagine some particular kind of dog, a
>>> prototype; but what is the prototype of a brown thing
>>> ?].
>>
>> A good counterexample is "fist", which is a noun in the IE languages
>> and
>> Chinese (and probably lots of others) despite the obvious fact that it
>> represents a certain state of the hand, and sometimes even
>> inchoatively
>> so:  "He clenched his fists" refers to the hands as fists even though
>> they don't become fists until after they are clenched.  So our feeling
>> for noun-ness is mere habit.
>
> Um, on that logic, just about any everyday concrete noun is a good
> counterexample - a hand, afterall, is just one out of a very strictly
> limited
> set of configurations of mostly water and some organic compounds.
>
>                                                                Andreas

This seems like a good point for Dan to jump in and tell us all some
more about rtemmu. :)


-Stephen (Steg)
  "elf booty got soul!"
      ~ highly amusing tolkien-fan geek-rap