Re: valency question

From: "Tom Tadfor Little" <tom@...>
> The main thing is that you recognize you have a verb with two different
> types of object, and you need a way to distinguish which is which.
Right!  I was looking for ideas.

> It's
> really just a coincidence in your beaver example that one of the objects is
> an adjective in a substantive role, rather than a noun, leading to a
> different possibility for ambiguity.
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.

> >Also a different kind of sentence:
> >
> >      Mary thought about a cat eating.
> >      Mary thought about eating a cat.
> >
> >This seems to be similar but with whether the verb "thought about eating"
> >calls the noun "a cat", or whether it's the verb "thought about" calling the
> >phrase "a cat eating".  [Are there two kinds of -ing verb here?]
>
> My analysis: In the first sentence, "eating" is a verbal adjective
> (gerundive in Latin parlance), modifying "cat" which is the object of
> "thought about". In the second, "eating" is a verbal noun (gerund), which
> itself is the object of "thought about"; "cat" is in turn the object of the
> gerund. Verbal nouns and verbal adjectives generally have different forms;
> in English they happen to be the same.
Okay!  I think in Hadwan the nouns and the adjectives have the same form, but
they probably wouldn't use the same in both sentences--the second might use a
compound form like "cat-eating".

> In considering what to do with this sort of thing in a conlang, my
> inclination would be to group verbs that you would like to take two objects
> into semantic classes, and decide how your conlang would treat each class,
> either by a word-order convention, a case or prepositional convention, or
> by recasting the idea (as by using clauses instead of objects).
I think I may in Hadwan use a conjunction for this.  It'd be something like
English 'as' ("count all men as brothers", and possibly "thought about a cat as
eating"...)

    *Muke!

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