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Re: Preventatives

From:Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 8, 2004, 18:17
Dan Sulani said:
> I wonder why cultures don't seem to > feel a need (AFAIK) to grammatically mark prevention as well > as causation?
In any reasonably parsimonious semantic description, every expression of prevention is also an expression of causation, while not every expression of causation is an expression of prevention -- because it's easy to describe prevention in terms of causation and negation (both of which we'd be hard-put to do without in any semantic description). "Montezuma made Cortez eat possum." is not parsimoniously described as "Montezuma prevented Cortez from failing to eat possum.", and these two forms are even more pragmatically distinct than the oft-cited "kill" <--> "cause to die" pair. It's generally pretty easy to express prevention using whatever causative encodings you have in the language, so there's probably not often very much pressure for it to be grammaticalized to the same degree as simple causation. I also don't remember ever encountering a grammatical marker for PREVENT in a natlang or in any taxonomy of grammatical structures. -- Mark

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Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>