Re: USAGE: Teaching Children

yl-ruil <yl-ruil@...> wrote:

>I've just come across a knotty problem. How would your
>languages say something like "she teaches languages to
>children"? Most of mine would probably use a double
>accusative, or maybe put "children" in the dative and
>"languages" in the accusative.
In Draseléq, it would be a ditransitive construction.
The object becomes a complement (called an "i-object",
because it's preceded by the particle _i_) and the
indirect object takes the "accusative" (note the quotes
-- this case is normally used with direct objects):

    I lethth    kuaqs    kerr  dhidhanthn
    * languages teach.3s 3sFEM children.ACC


(Some uses of _i_ are similar to the French partitives
_de, des_.)

Ditransitive verbs can also be transitive with i-objects
alone (like many verbs where the action does not affect
the object directly, esp. the perception verbs):

    I lethth    kuaqs    kerr.
    * languages teach.3s 3sFEM
    'She teaches languages.'

If there's an ACC object, the i-object is seldom elided;
the possible structures are O1VSO2, O1VS, or VS ("She
teaches" in general).



--Pablo Flores
  http://www.geocities.com/pablo-david/index.html
  "... When all men on earth think, day and night, about the
   Zahir, which one will be a dream and which one a reality?"
                              Jorge Luis Borges, _The Zahir_