Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're point
| From: | Joshua Shinavier <jshinavi@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, December 10, 1998, 12:05 |
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> > I have yet to meet someone who could explain just what the distinction betw=
> > een
> > nouns, verbs, and adjectives is supposed to represent;
>
> I feel that you answered yourself to your own question : PoS is mainly based
on aspectivation, that is : on degree of integration. So if you flatten that
vector you don't have any distinction anymore in PoS. in English i feel there
are roughly from least to most integrated : verb, participle, subclause,
adjective, compound. in japanese : verb/verb adjective, subclause, noun. In
Khmer : verb/adjective, noun.
> in Danove"n I reckon : word, operator.
It's true that there is no clear dividing line between semantic words and
cases/some operators -- a semantic word which is used quite commonly in a
"peripheral" position (and seldom as the subject or the verb) and is especially
abstract (relating to thought rather than physical reality) may become a
case (and cases may be used as operators, though they *also* may be used as
ordinary semantic words). But this distinction is for convenience only and
does not correspond to any clear conceptual distinction. It's a "harmless"
split, as cases and semantic words may be used interchangeably -- an adjective
with an object is the very same thing as a case used as an operator.
The logical operators (and, or, etc.) and such are of course another matter.
Nouns you cannot be opposed because there is no process (not *progress*) so
everything is *frozen*, no reversive is implied.
In general that's true, but what about nouns like "fall", "event", "change"?
Or static verbs like "know", "stand", "exist"?
> Danove"n : noun matches from verb to noun :-) But you still have the operators
needed, see ?
I think it might eliminate a lot of confusion if I stopped calling the Danoven
"PoS" (which are only positions, not classes) nouns, verbs, etc. A "noun"
is a word (say, "don" -- something "good") used in a certain position, while
a "verb" (say, "donya" -- was good) is a word used in another position.
But "don" might also be used as the equivalent of an operator:
"done" (an "adjective" form) --> "davan done marelaynii" = "a doing which seems
good to a malicious person". The only difference is that with an operator
you needn't alter the object, whereas here we had to add the adjective-object
suffix -aynii. Cases and other upwards-branching operators (sorry, I'm getting
a little technical here...) are convenient but not strictly neccessary,
and conceptually there is *no difference at all* between such an operator and
a semantic word.
Er, what was the question? :-)