Re: Verbs and More Verbs

En réponse à Jim Grossmann <steven@...>:

> Hello,
>
> First things first:   In the sentence "John exited the building," what
> semantic role does "John" play?   Is he an agent?   Is he an
> experiencer?
> If he's something else, what's the name of that role?
>
Definitely an agent, unless someone or something pulled him out of the
building. But the sentence doesn't seem to refer to this kind of situation.

>
> This inspired me to come up with a syntactic criterion;  "intransitives
> are
> those verbs that can't be reflexive or reciprocal."    That makes "eats"
> as
> in "She eats," a transitive verb whose object can be dropped, but "fall"
> as
> in "He falls," intransitive.  I found a possible counter-example in
> "broadcast."   If my analysis is wrong-headed, it's NOT the fault of
> Padraic
> and others.
>
Well, maybe this analysis would work with English, but it won't in a language
like Spanish, which allows intransitive verbs like ir: to go to become
reflexive: irse: to leave (okay, the meaning has shifted, but syntactically
it's still the reflexive of ir). In French, we learn that intransitive verbs
cannot become passive, while transitive verbs can. It's a good criterion for
French, but not for English which uses the passive voice much more often than
French.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.