Re: Help: Zhyler ECM/Raising Verbs (Longish)

Hi!

David Peterson <ThatBlueCat@...> writes:
> I discovered a problem that, for some reason, never occurred to me
> before in the course of working with Zhyler.
>...
> The problem that arose was with sentences like "I want you to do x"
> or "I want the man to do x".  You can't just add the suffix to the
> verb, because it doesn't work if the speaker is different from the
> subject.  So...
>
> uspan-ar us-po-m /food-ACC. eat-VOL.-1sg./ = "I want to eat", but
>
> uspan-ar us-po-l /food-ACC. eat-VOL.-2sg./ = "?I want you to eat the
> food" or "You want to eat the food"
>
> For that matter, what if someone else wants it?  It's a big mess.
> You don't run into this problem with something like "can", though,
> because you can't get, *"I can you to run" (meaning something like,
> "I'm able to (be?) your running").  However, you do run into the
> problem here.
Hmm, this reminds me of Japanese which, according to a book I have,
prohibits expression of inner states of other people.  Therefore, you
cannot directly say 'You want to eat the food' in Japanese.  You'd
have to say 'You seem to want to eat the food' (or 'I looks like...'
or....).  If you introduce this constraint into Zhyler, the above
sentence would clearly mean 'I want you to eat the food', because you
could not say anything about the other person's feeling.  You'd need
an extra verb for expressing 'you seem to [want to eat the food]'.
Maybe

   food-ACC eat-VOL-COMP seem.2SG.

Or something.  I don't know Zhyler grammar... :-)

This is somewhat the other way around than the solution shown in the
course of your posting:

> The first part of my solution was simply to add a dummy verb, and
> that verb is "to see".  So, what you get are sentences like, "I want
> to see you eat the food" which would have the same meaning as the
> neutral English sentence, "I want you to eat the food".  That's all
> fine and well, but I'm having **A LOT** of trouble figuring out how
> to get it to work.
Maybe Japanese helps you! :-)

You say that 'can' does not have the problem you face with 'want'.
But that might only be a pepuliar bias of English to distinguish
between them.  My Tyl-Sjok allows the verb 'can' to have a (causative)
agent:

   I    can [you eat food].
   agt  V   pat
             agt V   pat

This then means 'I enable you to eat.' (it ambiguously also means 'I
enable that you eat food.', but this would not be the preferred
reading.)

However, for my personal taste, your constraints for 'can' are nice
and reasonable as they are, and adding a constraint like in Japanese
makes the situation neat (in my taste :-)).

**Henrik