Re: Looking for a case: counting

Philippe Caquant <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

<<<<<
>To me, that should not be a case. Cases apply to noun
>concepts. I understand the expression 'many times' as
>if it was an temporal adverb, 'manitimes', modifying
>the sens of the verb 'threw'.
>>>>>
You can say it is undercover ad-verb wearing the civilian noun case tag.
However I learned in school that it is a "complément circonstanciel" (de
temps, de moyen, de manière, etc.) "Circumstance" is tagged with a
"locative" case or clitic in many languages (Hebrew, Japanese, etc.) A
circumstance may determine the verb (hence "adverb") but also the clause
itself. Linguists then say that it determines the VP regardless that it
sometimes really determines an object.

Regarding aspect: "Iterative" and other aspects are sometimes part of the
semantic definition of a word such as the verb "to repeat" or else at a
syntactic level like in "many times." I can understand that it is
interesting to point out the first in order to differentiate verbs or
expressions from each other, but I fail to understand why some learned
authors christen extraordinary simple locutions like "many times" with big
names such as "iterative". If so, there should be an aspect for "many times
in a very short time in long sequences" and a special "causative" expressed
in English with the words "for the reason that" or a partial causative for
the Japanese "no sei de". I can make a different case or aspect especially
for any and all words of a language.

Don't big words "dissolve" real words into illusive abstract tags to show
that semantics at a word level is unecessary to understand language? Why--If
there is no "many times" anymore but only an abstract "iterative aspect
expressed with an NP", then why bother with the true meaning of the words
"many" and "times" and how they are expressed in different languages?

µ

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