Re: Grammar-holes: secondary predication

* Carsten Becker said on 2007-06-06 14:33:29 +0200
> On Tue, 5 Jun 2007 13:17:19 +0200, taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-
> conlang@NVG.ORG> wrote:
> > "Jane cooked the chicken hot" can mean:
> >
> > "Jane was hot while cooking the chicken" (depictive, subject)
> > "The chicken was hot while Jane cooked it" (depictive, object)
> > "The chicken became hot as a result of Jane cooking it" (resultative)
>
> >Is this a hole in your grammars also?
>
> I fear so.
Maybe I should specify "hole" better. A language needn't have a
super-compressed syntactic shortcut for every similar shortcut
in English, as for depictives and resultatives there are plenty
of languages that don't, but it might be perceived as a hole by
somebody who only knows English and tries to translate from
English into the language. Considering the audience it is
therefore wise to somehow somewhere show how the equivalent is
done.

If anyone then comes along saying "but it dosen't mean exactly
the same thing because this structure implies that while yours
doesn't", well, then you remind the complainer that no
translation using languages that aren't 100% relexes of
eachother will ever get 100% of the information across 100%
unchanged, as this is the very nature (and problem) of translation.

> There are ways to get around this, though, /../
You have thought of a way getting around it, ergo the grammar
lacks this hole. Now go forth and document! :)


t.

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