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Re: Evolution of Applicatives

From:Steven Williams <feurieaux@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 19:19
 --- Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> skrev:

> However, the sentence is weird. First, 'Bandagen'
is a
> funny word.
I thought it was a legitimate word for 'bandage'. What's the usual word?
> Second, the verb is strange. You could use
'angezogen'
> (from 'anziehen' - to don) or 'ausgezogen' (from
'ausziehen'
> - to doff). But I would not claim that the above
sentence is
> wrong, just a bit weird. 'abziehen' reminds be of
'peeling'. Ah. I felt something was a bit off in my choice of verb. Evidently, I need to hit the dictionaries again.
> Wir sprechen über das Buch. > We speak about the-ACC book-ACC. > > Wir besprechen das Buch. > we speak-about the-ACC book-ACC > > The 'be-' prefix often changes the valence this way, > but it is not regular at all.
Like the pair 'schreiben' (to write) and 'beschrieben' (to describe). Many many more pairs like that that are more than a mere valency shift (and actually, since both 'schreiben' and 'beschreiben' are transitive verbs, it's not a valency shift at all). I love the 'be-' prefix. I have a devil of a time trying to pin down its exact grammatical function (or range of functions, rather). As a native English speaker, I'm used to valency operations being simple, as in simply giving an intransitive verb a transitive object. German is that much more elegant.