Sundry thoughts (was: Re: THEORY nouns and cases)

John writes:

>ObDigression:  Anna Weetabix
Isn't this a cracker?

>claims, with what accuracy I don't know,
>that this concept does not exist in Russian (nor does the concept of
>"white lie");
My native informant says that "white lie" does not exist, but she
does say that "agree to disagree" is possible with the same meaning
as in English.

>OTOH, English interlocutors can express agreement in
>varying intensities from "I entirely agree" to simply "Right", whereas
>"I entirely disagree" and "Wrong" are conversationally impossible.
>Not so in Russian, where the negatives are as usable as the positives.
Well, "entirely" is weird, but it's possible to imagine contexts
where "I completely disagree" or "I totally disagree" would work.
Likewise, "See ya, Mom. I'm off to the movies and'll be back at
1:00AM." "Wrrrronnng!" ("Wrongo" sounds better, I guess.)

>Anyhow, "ba" does not merely front the direct object: it also carries
>specific semantics, those of "disposal".  If the direct object is not
>disposed of, "ba" is inapplicable.
Does "ba" really "front" the direct object? To be sure, it brings it
closer to the head of the sentence, but doesn't necessarily afford
the emphasis I normally assocoiate with fronted direct objects. For
that, you can actually *front* a direct object in Chinese by
topicalizing it:

Bingqilin wo xihuan, pingguopai wo bu xihuan.
Ice cream, I like; apple pie, I don;t like.

but I don't feel any particular emphasis in:

Ba men shuanqilai.
Bolt the door.

Which brings us to the word "disposal". I was going to respectfully
beg to differ, but after consulting the all-knowing Li & Thompson
(which, I presume, is where you got the term from), I see it's used
in the sense of "dispatch with", perhaps. I never thought of it that
way. I thought of it as the way you handle expressions with
resultative verbs (ba liwu baoqilai - wrap a present). Objects after
resultative verbs sound really clunky to my ear. I suppose
resultative verbs deal with "dispatching" or "disposing of" direct
objects. L & T also talk about "ba" indicating how we feel about the
direct object in context (and I didn't read the *entire* entry during
my morning ablutions), but I didn't get a specific sense of emphasis.

Kou

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