Re: valency question

In a message dated 5/11/01 6:44:39 AM, langs@QUANDARY.ORG writes:

<< 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"! >>

    Certainly, though, you can see how the two meanings would merge, or,
perhaps, two meanings arose from a word with one meaning.  If you call or
summon someone you have to call them by some sort of a name, or you could
just say "you".  And if the person summoned thought the choice of name that
was used to refer to him/her was odd, he might tell someone else later
"So-and-so called me by the name X", and so on.
    But as for the general idea, I seem to find that in modern English there
are so many different shades of meaning that can be separated into different
words.  I find myself inventing words for some of my languages that may not
exist by themselves in any other language I've ever seen.  I think the two
versions of "call" are good examples.

-David