Re: More thoughts about S11 grammar

Henrik Theiling wrote:

>It is strange that I wanted to ultimately eliminate the need for
>distinguishing arguments and adjuncts and now arrived at a similarly
>arbitrary borderline between special verbs and normal verbs.  Yet the
>normal intransitive verbs just don't feel elegant in some cases.
>Comments, suggestions, criticism, please! :-)
Sorry to not really be replying to the post, but a few nights ago something
occurred to me about your system that I thought I might share (and hope
hasn't been said already).

Your goal is to get rid of the arbitrary line between arguments and
adjuncts, but does using suppletive verb forms get in the way of this?  I
think you said that, for example, there'd be one verb for "to read" and then
a second for "to be read".  Neither of these requires the other, but if one
wishes to express the transitive concept "x reads y", one would have to
phrase it "x-reads y-is.read" and not, say, "x-reads y-is.bought".  But if
one then wanted to express, for example, "x reads y before dinner", one
would presumably use the construction, "x-reads y-is.read dinner.follows",
where the verb "follows" isn't stipulated by the verb "read".  For far,
there's not much of a problem, until you approach a case that's somewhere in
the middle, for example "x gives y to z" = "x-gives y-is.given z-receives".
Contrast that with "x sends y to z", or something, = "x.sends y-is.sent
z.receives".  At this point, you have to choose whether the two verbs for
"receive" are different (and therefore presumably take part in the
suppletion of the other verbs; i.e. you have one set
give/be.given/receive.gift and another send/be.sent/receive.mail) or not.

In the first case, what you end up with is essentially a trivalent verb set:
to express all three entities that take part in the action, you have to use
specifically those three verbs, whereas to show the involvement of other
entities you are more free in your verb choice.  You then have an arbitrary
distinction between nouns that must be paired with verbs from the suppletive
set (the equivalent of arguments) and those that need not be (the equivalent
of adjuncts).  Even if you decide to have a catch-all verb for "to.receive"
and all other such roles, all you've done is made the decision that all your
verb sets are at most ditransitive.  There's still an arbitrary line between
which verbs must complement each other and which needn't.

So although arguments, a given number of NPs required by a given verb, don't
exist as such, there seems to be an equally arbitrary set of verbs that must
come in pairs/triples/whatever (assuming one wants to express all the
relevent roles).



Hoping that his meandering logic has been followed,

Paul Sherrill
amicably confused newbie

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