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

Philippe Caquant wrote at 2004-04-26 12:14:40 (-0700)
 > I agree with "to dog" or "desum", and many more (in
 > French we haven't a verb "to dog" (chienner ?), but we
 > have "singer" (to imitate mockingly, like a monkey). I
 > said that nearly anything could become a verb, but my
 > question was: zachem ? as the Russians say, "what for
 > ?"

What do you mean, "what for"?  There are natural languages which do
the same thing, or very close (theorists disagree).  See
e.g. Nuuchahnulth (Nootka):
http://wings.buffalo.edu/soc-sci/linguistics/people/students/dissertations/davidson.PDF

For example
|
|In Makah and Nuuchahnulth, nominals may function directly as predicate
|heads with no intervening copular element.  They take predicate
|clitics exactly as verbal predicates do: there are no restrictions on
|the predicate clitics they may occur with.  The words in (205)-(206)
|show Makah nouns and property words as heads of class-inclusion
|predicates;  that is, predicates denoting a class of entities the
|subject is asserted to be a member of.  Example (207) shows an
|intransitive verbal predicate for comparison.  The coding of each
|clause type is identical: the mood and pronominal clitics are attached
|directly to the predicate head in all cases (only the masculine
|singular gloss is given for the third person examples for sake of
|economy.)
|
|          MAKAH
|(205) a.  wikwi'ya'ks	    b.  wikwi'ya'wic	c.  wikwi'ya'w
|	   wikwi'ya:k^w=s       wikwi'ya:k^w=°ic    wikwi'ya:k^w=°i
|	   boy=INDIC.1sg        boy=INDIC.2sg       boy=INDIC.3sg
|	   'I am a boy'         'You are a boy'     'He is a boy'
|
|(206) a.  k^wa?aks	    b.  k^wa?awic	c.  k^wa?aw	
|	   k^wa?ak^w=s	        k^wa?ak^w=°ic	    k^wa?ak^w=°i
|	   small=INDIC.1sg	small=INDIC.2sg     small=INDIC.3sg
|	   'I am small'         'You are small'     'He is small'
|
|(207) a.  babuyaks	    b.	babuyawic	c.  babuyaw
|	   babuyak^w=s		babuyak^w=°ic	    babuyak^w=°i
|	   work=INDIC.1sg	work=INDIC.2sg      work=INDIC.3sg
|	   'I am working'       'You are working'   'He is working'

 > In order to hide under the carpet the fact there are such concepts
 > as entities, properties, relations, temporary states, etc ? Why
 > should we pretend that entities (choses-en-soi) are similar to
 > action verbs, for ex ?

Why should we pretend they aren't?  What makes you think their
differences are so much more significant than their similarities that
they should be placed in lexicalised syntactic classes?  There's no
unarguably correct way of dividing up concepts into
noun/verb/adjective; natural languages differ as to which category
things should be assigned, even when the languages have similar sorts
of category.

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