Re: Nouns with arguments, verbs without arguments

Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
<<<
Instead of "iønza lyrivak", you have to say "iønza rse lyrivaka" ("it's
raining _as_ violets"). The verb "iønz-" can only take oblique arguments.
So I'm wondering if there are any other langs that work like this.
>>>
I've seen a few languages whose verbs, adjectives and nouns have "direct"
arguments although they are technically "intransitive" and "oblique" in
western grammars.

for instance in Japanese: yama wo aruku. "to walk the mountain"
and in Indonesian: kaya uang. "rich (with) money" ; piringan nasi. "a plate
of rice"
and English: to wend one's way.
and other related langs: een kopje koffie, eine tasse kaffee.

But really it depends what you call "oblique" or "direct".
In western grammars the object of a verb is said "direct" when it is not
tagged as "oblique", and we equate obliqueness with clitics, adpositions,
non-accusative case tags or the relative position of to related objects (to
give a woman a gift). It's tautological.
So saying a word is a "direct object" only tells you that technically
there's no need of a chupchik to glue that object to the verb, but yet it
does not really tell the real semantic role of that object. The fact is that
there may be different kinds of "direct object". R. Morneau tries to round
them up into two main ones he calls "patient" and "focus". But these are
only two fuzzy, convenient drawers to cram in plenty of different stuff. for
instance:

i make dough. (dough is a result.)
i kick his butt. (butt is a patient.)
i play an instrument. (instrument is an instrument.)
i sing a song. (song is either a performance or a pattern.)
i can see a tree here but really it's a mirage. (tree is either the object
you focus at or the image your eyes create.)
it's two-meter high. call him stupid. (two meter and stupid are patterns.)
etc.

You may call some of them "direct objects" and some of them "adverbal nouns"
or "adverbal adjectives" but in fact this shows that a verb may have several
objects that don't require a clitic, non-accusative case tag or an
adposition and that each such "direct" object has a different role. Swapping
direct objects sometimes changes the "valency" of the verb from patient to
result (ex. "to sculpt a piece of wood" vs. "to sculpt a statue") or patient
A to patient B (ex. "to load the carriage" vs. "to load timber"). So much
that the verb may be considered semantically changed since its core
arguments change accordingly. I supect some loglangers would disagree here
and argue that the verb keeps being the same and only the rank and number of
valencies of its arguments are changed.

So in the same way, the complements to nouns do not always require a
"genitive" tag in all languages. That may be a dative, a preposition, etc.
or a "direct object" of course.

Mathias

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