Re: Looking for a case: counting
| From: | Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Monday, February 16, 2004, 7:50 |
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Well, I think this discussion is not going to help me
neither anyone anyhow. If instrumental is the same as
process quantifier, if process quantifier is the same
as temporal mark, and if we have to disregard the
German form 'vielmals' because it doens't cope with
your theory, if trying to find the primitive,
all-mankind concepts is supposed to be the same as
classifying some natlang as retrograde, if logic is
useless anyway, and if cats are dogs, then surely we
will come to an awful mess, which can be fun but which
is not my purpose.
--- Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> En réponse à Philippe Caquant :
>
> I just consider it to be a temporal mark. I don't
> see the point of such a
> useless distinction.
Well, maybe you don't see it, but it looks like some
linguists can see it. I didn't write their books.
>
> Which is basically the same form as "many times",
> without a preposition.
> It's this absence of preposition that makes you
> think of this form as more
> adverbial than "with a hammer". Your analysis at the
> beginning of your post
> shows it very clearly.
I thought exactly the opposite, but if you decided
so...
>
> >I maybe misunderstood the point, but I thought that
> >people were trying to realize semantic concepts in
> >conlangs.
>
> Yes, and your reply is wrong in that way: it doesn't
> treat semantic
> concepts but surface forms.
Same remark.
Japanese
> encodes politeness in
> verbs. Does it make it semantically different from
> the politeness used in
> French, which is encoded in nouns only? No.
Well, that's very precisely what I say over and over:
we should find the general semantic primitives below
the surface forms. Comparing natlangs is a great help
for it.
Surface
> forms say nothing about
> semantic concepts. Which is why instead of answering
> to questions about
> semantic concepts with considerations of surface
> forms (as you did), I
> advised you to think deeper and recognised that
> semantically the
> distinction you made was meaningless.
I shall not abjure my convictions, Your Honour ! Only
relevant arguments can make me reconsider them, not
anatheme neither mixing up everything.
=====
Philippe Caquant
"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
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