Re: Requesting some challenging sentences

Hallo!

Carsten Becker wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Sorry that I only write now, but I haven't been at home for
> the past 5 days -- it was a very spontaneous decision, so no
> notification of absence.
>
> On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, 23:38 CEST, Gary Shannon wrote:
>
>  >> fascinating grammar! Would love to see where you go
>  >> with this.
>
> Seconded, it's definitely interesting! Did you update it? I
> downloaded what you've typed up until then some months ago.
>
>  > Curious that I could get this far on the grammar and
>  > never stop to consider transitive verbs!!!  For some
>  > reason it never crossed my mind, and yet such simple
>  > utterences as "John gave the book to Mary" are pretty
>  > convoluted in the basic grammar.
>
> But that's a _di_transitive verb. You can avoid
> ditransitives by dative movement. And IIRC applicatives
> transform transitive sentences in intransitive ones. I
> always forget what applicatives are and what they're
> doing :( I only remember Henrik once explaining me it's
> approximately the difference between "We speak about
> the book" and "We 'bespeak' the book" (note that that's
> grammatical in German).
An applicative raises an oblique argument to direct object,
thus turning a ditransitive or intransitive clause into a
(mono)transitive clause.  Examples from German:

Peter schenkt Paula ein Buch.  -> Peter beschenkt Paula mit einem Buch.
NOM           DAT       ACC       NOM             ACC

Herr Reich-Ranitzki spricht über ein Buch.
  -> Herr Reich-Ranitzki bespricht ein Buch.
     NOM                               ACC

But on the original subject:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0112C&L=CONLANG&P=R32912&I=-3

Now this is indeed challenging!

Greetings,

Jörg.

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