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

Philippe wrote:

"I cannot see why I should say "him-ACC the cake-DAT".

You don't have to. Unless you want a casemarking language like Latin. But in
the sentence "I want him to eat the cake", "I" is the subject, "him" is the
direct object, and "cake" is the indirect object.

"Dative comes from Latin "dare", and originally means "to give (to)".

I don't quite see your point. "DAT" stands for "dative case", as you know.
It marks the indirect object of a sentence, and has nothing to do with
giving.

"I don't see the need to add "to see" neither: maybe when he will eat the
cake, I'll be 500 miles away, so I won't see anything at all.

The expression "want to see" is idiomatic. Some languages just use the
expression--English-speakers can say "have to" for "must". Mark
Rosenfelder's Kebreni (http://www.zompist.com/kebreni.htm) does this: "The
publisher wants (lit. wants-to-see) the story!". "see" is essentially a
placeholder, because in Kebreni, for example, "[there] is no word for 'want'
as an independent lexical item".

"I don't think that "I eat-VOL cake" is the same as I (cake-eat)-VOL.

They're exactly the same thing! You're confusing yourself with word order
and argument roles.

"What I want is to eat cake, and not just to eat, so -VOL should apply to
the whole phrase, and not just to the verb."

Which it does. That point makes absolutely no sense. The phrase "I want to
eat" is in the sentence, *as well as* the word "cake". So obviously you want
to eat *cake*, not something else.

Trebor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Trebor1990 "If you pulled the
wings off a fly, would it then be called a walk?"

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