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Re: Tlvn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

From:Ed Heil <edheil@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 14, 1999, 21:23
> 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? -------------------------------------------------------------- Ed just stopped in to see what condition his condition was in. edheil@postmark.net --------------------------------------------------------------