Re: just curious.. ;)

On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 08:16:39PM -0400, David Peterson wrote:
[snip]
> 7.) Ditransitive, positional: "I put the book on the table".  (With "put" or
> "place", you can't say "I put
>     the book" or "I put on the table"; it just doesn't make sense.  There are
> two definite roles that
>     have to be fulfilled in order for the phrase to make sense.)
In Mandarin (and I suspect in other Asian langs like Japanese) you can say
"I put on the table" and it would be understood that you put *something*
on the table, even though you didn't mention it.  Of course, there is
still this distinction, since such a sentence must be in the context where
the listener knows what you're talking about.

> 8.) Ditransitive, benefactive: "I give the book to you" (This may be a
> biproduct of Western thought,
>     and not a real verb type.  After all, you could imagine a language where
> this idea would be
>     expressed "I take the book give you".  In fact, that goes for the other,
> as well.  Ditransitives can
>     really be expressed with two clauses or with serial verbs.)
In my L1, Hokkien, this is *exactly* the way you express the idea of
giving. In Mandarin you might say this is similar, although in that case
"the book" is marked as secondary(?) object; whereas in my L1 literally
two verbs are used: you can say "I take book give you" to imply handing
the book over, or you can say "I throw book give you" as the equivalent of
"I throw you the book".

[snip]
>     See, in inflectional, there are different endings for each case, whereas
> in agglutinative, there's a non-changing affix for each morpheme, and it's
> never reduced; they just get piled on.  I hope that's a simple (if not
> over-simplified), non-controversial explanation of the difference.  :)
Don't agglutinative languages go further than that? eg. you can pile a
whole lot more stuff than just inflectional suffixes. (Or am I getting
mixed up with polysynthetic languages?)


T

--
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