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Re: English question

From:Josh Roth <fuscian@...>
Date:Thursday, November 29, 2001, 7:28
In a message dated 11/29/01 1:34:19 AM, anstouh@YAHOO.COM.AU writes:

>On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Nik Taylor wrote: > >> Stefan Koch wrote: >> > "He voted Liberal." - Is the 'Liberal' an adjective or an adverb? >> >> I'd say neither. I'd say it's a noun, the object of the verb "voted". >> The verb "vote" requires "for" when referring to a specific individual >> ("He voted for Bush") but optional when referring to parties ("He voted >> Republican" OR "He voted for the Republicans") > >Not if it takes `one' instead: `He voted Bob Brown one', although that's >rare because people are more likely to say `He voted for the Greens'. >(Australia uses the preferential voting system where one numbers people >rather than voting for them; Senator Bob Brown is the leader of the Green >party; I would've voted the Greens one if I wasn't seventeen.) > >Incidentally, can anyone say what the `one' is there? A preposition? A >part of the verb (like those other verb-preposition pairs an example of >which I can never come up with when I want one)? And also, what's a better >name for prepositions in English, given that they can go before and after >things?
"One" in your sentence is just a noun, I believe. It's the same kind of structure as in "I sent him a letter." "Bob Brown" and "him" are indirect objects, and "one" and "letter are direct ones - they're all nouns. About prepositions, I don't know if we really need another name for them. They almost always go before things. Cases where they come after are few and far between - "Where to?" or "searched the world over" come to mind but these sound a little stilted/archaic/strange. The more general name is "adpositions" though, of which "prepositions" and "postpositions" are types. Or maybe you're thinking of cases like "The painting I looked at" where the P comes at the end. I still would call it a preposition, just one that happens to have an elided object maybe. Obconlang: Eloshtan's postpositions are conjugated, so they can also occur without objects (most of them anyway). But I still call them postpositions, because when they do occur with a noun, they occur after. I guess you could generalize this to English too - even if there is no noun right next to the adposition, the adp. is understood to be applying to a noun. And where that noun would be if it were expressed in the same phrase determines if it is a pre- or -postposition. (Maybe there are inpositions too?) More conlang: Kar Marinam has I think 12 cases. It doesn't have adpositions at all. Things that are adpositions in other langs and are not expressed by a case form are indicated by adjectives. For example: you can say 'in the tree' by using the inessive case: "keligisni" where "kelik" is 'tree' and "sni" is the inessive ending. but 'under the tree' must be expressed with an adjective 'under' and the inessive case: "blih kelikigimisni" where "blihgim" is 'under' - so it's kind of like saying 'in the under tree'
>Tristan > >anstouh@yahoo.com.au > >War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left. > - BSD Games' Fortune
Josh Roth http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html