Re: Looking for a case: counting

En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
>
> > "Adverbs" are just
> > noun phrases in some local, temporal, instrumental (or other such cases)
> > case.
>
>I must say I find it more intuitive to think of oblique noun cases (incl
>oblique uses of core cases) as adverbs. Partly because seeing "well" as "with
>goodness" or something of the sort feels terribly pointless.
Indeed. And if you read carefully, my whole point was that making such a 
distinction was pointless, and that since historically, adverbs most often 
derive from noun phrases, making "adverbs" the central concept is 
misleading. It's a derived concept.

>According to how they taught us grammar back in school, your example "with a
>hammer" is not an adverb, the term being restricted to morphology. The thing
>would have been said to be formally a prepositional phrase and functionally an
>_adverbial_ (dunno English term).
That's why I wrote "adverbs", with quotes. The term "adverb" is indeed 
restricted to morphology (and to the morphology of languages having such 
kinds of words). But Philippe was talking in general. And in general, 
there's no need to treat adverbs like "slowly" and prepositional phrases 
like "with a hammer" differently: they syntactically work identically.

>Now, all of this is a question of terminoloy, but the distinction
>between "adverb" (form) and _adverbial_ (function) seems useful to me.
OK, but the discussion was about the function only, so there was no 
confusion possible. And the distinction is useful only *in languages that 
make it*. The question that generated this thread was general, not the 
notion of adverb. So answering a general question with a non-general answer 
is wrong, when you try to pass it as general. That was the core of my own 
reply.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.