Re: valency question

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 08:31:27PM -0400, Muke Tever wrote:

> True, but I think that was the example's idea.  In an language where adjectives
> follow nouns you could have:
>
>     Juan llamó  el  gato feo.
>     John called the cat  ugly
>    "John called the ugly cat/John called the cat ugly."
>
> I suppose this would be possible?  It would be ambiguous without having to
> change the word order.
To me, these two examples of "call" are two separate words, and would be
separate words in a conlang, unless I wanted it to be a European conlang.

One word is "to call, to summon", with a single object.

The other one would be "to call, to name, to refer to as", with two objects,
which you could keep as two objects distinguished, perhaps, by case, or
you could move one of the objects into a prepositional phrase - or you could
noun-incorporate one of them!  "John ugly-called the cat"!

Amanda
"Mom, he ugly-called me!!!"  heehee

Reply