Re: Fluid-S pivot in Old Albic

# 1 <salut_vous_autre@...> wrote:
> Like, "The man threw the ball and hit" that, in english, would need an
> object for "hit" to be grammatical. But a language could have a meaninglike "The
> man threw the ball and [the man] hit [the ball]" or, morestrangely, because
> it uses the opposite agent-patient roles, "The manthrew the ball and [the
> ball] hit [the man]".
The ordinary syntax of course is 'The man threw the ball and hit it'
giving both verbs an object, but if the object is taken from "threw"
and only given to "hit" it still works:

    The man threw and hit the ball.
   (The man threw [the ball] and hit the ball.)

This may be ambiguous, because 'throw' can be intransitive, with the
man having thrown an unstated object, perhaps a hammer, and hit the
ball with it, but even if the first verb only works transitively
this works:

    John broke and boiled the potato.
   (John broke [the potato] and boiled the potato.)

This is a less ambiguous example because 'broke' and 'boiled' without
objects are middle voice (X breaks or boils ~= X gets broken or boiled)
so unless John is understood to be a robotic chef of some kind both
verbs are sharing the same object.



	*Muke!
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