Re: Preventatives

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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