Re: Looking for a case: counting

Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:

> Many things are derived from many things, but the fact
> is that if you analyse syntactically a German phrase
> containing the word 'vielmals' today, you most likely
> have to define it as an adverb. That's syntax, not
> semantics.
If I were to do that, I'd conlcude that _vielmals_ is an adverbial. Exactly
like English _many times_. "Adverb" isn't a syntactic category in the grammar
I was taught.

If we were to move to a morphological level of analysis, yes, _vielmals_ is of
course synchronically an adverb, while _many times_ at least arguably is an
oblique NP.

Notice that the concept of "adverb" (unlike "adverbial") does not map well
between different languages.

> (As an exercise, we could try to analyse
> syntactically, then semantically, the - very common -
> expression 'Danke vielmals'. What is 'danke', and what
> is 'vielmals' ?)
I'd be severely tempted to analyze that, on the syntactic level, as a unitary
discourse particle.

(FWIW, in my experience, 'Danke vielmals' is not common. Simple 'Danke viel'
is much more usual. Could be regional, of course.)

> As to iterative marks applied to the verb, I already
> mentioned some very interesting Russian verb forms in
> a previous message, so this EXISTS, I didn't fancy it.
I never said it didn't. But I should have learnt by now that humans
unaccountably tend to interpret "A doesn't prove B" as "B is false".

                                                              Andreas