Re: METAGRAM -- Pt. 2 (and triggers too)

> --- Caleb Hines <cph9fa@A...> wrote:
> > Time for some more METAGRAM (sounds like a vitamin).
> >
> <snip>
>
> >
> > <because> we {needing{of milk}} I {going{to store}}
> >
>
> Just a quick observation (more after I've had time to
> study the rest of it)
>
> Personally, it seems more logical or natural to write
>
> needing_of{milk} rather than needing{of milk} where
> "needing_of" is taken to be a single word.
>
> I'm not sure I can justify that impression except to
> say that it's closer to the way I did it in my own
> similar project a while back.
Thanks for the suggestion! I could maybe see the sense of doing it that way
if milk were always the only argument of the verb (as it was in this
instance). But what if I had several arguments for the verb? I want to be
able to put all the arguments into one predicate list.

Compare:
needing{of milk, for breakfast, tommorow}
?*needing-of{milk}, needing-for{breakfast}, needing{tommorow}
?*needing-of{milk, for breakfast, tommorow}

My reason for doing it this way is that "needing" is a noun ("the
act-of-needing") which is then modified by its predicates ("of milk", "for
breakfast", "tommorow", etc...). The second way is obviously too long (no
need to repeat "needing" thrice). If I decided to go with the third way
above, I wouldn't bother with the word "of":

*needing{milk, for breakfast, tommorow}

But here I would have to introduce an extra rule for transitive verbs,
which I would realy rather not do if it can be helped. I going for
similarity of all arguments (as much as possible). "Tommorow" is allowed to
be a stand-alone argument because it is an adverb. However, you could even
insist on treating "tommorow" as a noun and preposition-alizing it:

needing{of milk, for breakfast, during tommorow}

Though this is not really neccessary.

What I am essentially doing is putting the case (or "role" if you will) of
the noun 'milk' into the form of a prepostion. Admittedly, this sounds a
bit weird in English, because we don't usually use a preposition for the
direct object. However, if you turn a transitive verb into a gerund use it
as the subject of a sentence, and preceede it with an article, then there
is a precedence for using "of" as the prepostion indicating accusative
case. For example:

"The opening of the new wing will occur tommorow."
"The giving of gifts is a Christmas tradition."
"The writing of essays is a valuable skill."

In the first of these, 'of' might be able to be interpreted as either
genitive or accusative ("opening the wing" vs. "the opening that belongs to
the wing"), but this is surely not the case with the other two sentences
("giving gifts" vs. *"The giving which belongs to the gifts?"; "writing
essays" vs. *"The writing which belongs to the essays?").

Thanks,
~Caleb

P.S. - For those who don't subscribe to THEORY: posts, I'm sorry for
forgeting to put it in the subject line on that last post!

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