Re: English question

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