Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

> he didn't.
> of course a noun can be used to express a predicate :
> "he mans a ship"
> but this implies that the noun combines with a non-expressed
> verb ("to provide X with human team").
>
> there is a very sloppy trend among english speakers to obliviate
> that making nouns into verbs is known as "integration process"
> on the remaining part of the planet.
> the very strange fact is that noone seems interested in listing the
> integrating predicates.
I'm not familiar with "integration process," but it sounds like
something I might want to know about.  Can you explain it to me?  (And
remember, I can be a little slow sometimes.)

Not knowing about it, I would assume that turning nouns into verbs is
a blending process.  By putting the word "man" into a syntactic slot
which demands a verb, one essentially asks the hearer to create a new
verb, a transitive one, which has as a salient feature the referent of
the noun "man" -- a man -- and which could plausibly take as a direct
object the d.o. of the sentence -- the ship.  One draws upon context
(encyclopedic knowledge: ships need crews to run them) and comes up
with "to provide with a crew" or "to be a crew for."

At least, that is what one would do if "man" as a verb did not
already exist in the English language.  But it does.  So it's not so
much a matter of making a verb out of a noun -- the verb already
exists.  But presumably it once happened that way.

Is that more or less what you're talking about, or is it something
different?


> >  > or excluding "valency" 3, the more-or-less indirect object.
> >
> >  See Comrie, "Language Universals and Linguistic Typology" p.59-61,
> >  for some discussion on why English syntax may not warrant a separate
> >  category for "indirect object".
I'm really curious what Comrie says here, and don't have access to
the book.  Can anyone summarize?


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Ed just stopped in to see what condition his condition was in.
                   edheil@postmark.net
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