Re: USAGE: Verbs and verb compounds

Why didn't your system work, Matthew?   It seems to me that you can make
such a system work.

Jim


>I once had a system where all prepositions were verbs:
>(The cat) (is) (on the shelf.)
>becomes:
>(The cat) (is on) (the shelf).
>
>"To be on" was a verb in itself.  This system, however did not work very
>well.
>
>-Matthew
>
>Sally Caves writed:
>> > I've read that the prepositions now found in the Indo-European
>> > languages used to be adverbs. 'Extra' oblique arguments in a sentence
>> > just got a suitable case, like locative, and the adverb was only
>> > needed for precision. They were only grammaticalized as prepositions
>> > later.
>>
>> Thanks Lars, and hirie, Nik!  <GGGGGG>  Teonaht thinks of
>> prepositions as adverbs, essentially.  And I think there is a ghost
>> of this old thinking still present in English, despite the fact that
>> it has been heavily grammaticized and parceled into its parts of speech.
>> This is all I was trying to say.  Not that prepositions at the end
>> of a sentence were adverbs and not prepositions.
>>
>> > In that system, your two views of a detachable verb become the same.
>> >
>> > (Classical Latin still has a trace of the old system, where you don't
>> > use 'in' and 'to' with "names of cities and small islands," but just
>> > case forms (depending on the noun class, since the locative has merged
>