Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

Quoting João Ricardo Oliveira <hokstein@...>:

> I'm sorry, I made a mistake. "Sentence" is the wrong concept. In
> Portuguese,
> we call it _oração_, which is a statement that expresses an action, a
> characteristic of something, a state, a continuity of state or a change
> of
> state. I don't know what it is called in English.
I don't think this holds either; there's many languages that lack a verb "to be"
(a copula), which express things like "the stone is red" by "the stone red" or
similar. Can't think of a good natlang example right now, but Kalini Sapak has
sentences like _tahuku aguzama_ "the men (are/were) warriors".

> Let me try to rephrase it: Whenever a verb is present, it is the most
> important part of the sentence.
Hardly. Any remotely bureaucratic text written in the west will be brimful with
sentences like "investigations into the alleged voting fraud in Peter's poll
were undertaken" where the finite verb is really just providing moral support
for the noun phrase which describes what happened.

                                                              Andreas

Replies