Re: Preventatives

On Jun 8, 2004, at 8:05 AM, John Cowan wrote:
> Feeding is not really causing to eat, more like allowing to eat
> (allowing seems to me the true antonym to preventing).  As the proverb
> says, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it (= cause it
> to) drink.
>
> "Starve" has of course both a causative and a non-causative sense in
> English:  he starved / she starved him.  The first generally is
> perfective (it implicatures death), the latter is not.
>
> Killing is also more than causing to die, as in Fodor's (I think)
> examples:
>
>         I shot him on Thursday, which caused him to die on Friday.
>         *I shot him on Thursday, which killed him on Friday.
>
> These things are very tricky, as the Lojban community has discovered.
I'm not sure I agree with Fodor (or whoever) as I find the second
sentence perfectly normal.

Causatives with animate arguments also often carry a notion of intent,
as in the distinction between kill and murder -- and that between
"kill" and "cause to die". This seems a natural implication to me, and
may be hard to avoid in any language spoken by humans.

If you leave the issue of intent aside, "prevent x" is
cause(not(occur(x))); another one I've never seen is a form to mean
"not cause" and the more interesting "not prevent x" not(cause(not(x)))

With one-argument predicates like this (ignoring agents when they are
all the same) it's easy to make words for any chain of applications you
want. If you want to add intent in you could have variants like
intentionally prevent, accidentally prevent, intentionally not prevent,
etc.

An outermost not() is maybe less often packed into its argument because
of the availability of general negation -- although we have words like
"abstain from x" for not(do(x)).

    -- David

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