Re: Argument Structures

Sorry about the previous attempt, which I gather was illegible. It
never occured to me that no one would be able to read it.

(So you weren't ignoring me!)

Second time lucky?

Right. I've wondered this for a while.

Apart from the standard "transitive", "intransitive", and
"ditransitive" verbs found in English, and the "reflexive" verbs in
Romance languages, I'm not really familiar with many ways to introduce
various argument structures into languages. So when working on the
verbs in my (as yet unnamed) conlang, I tried to start from scratch
and managed to list the following:

"transitive": 1 agent, 1 patient              [I taught him]
"transitive, focused": 1 agent, 1 patient, 1 focus    [I taught him
Linguistics]
"reflexive" : 1 agent/patient [I taught myself]
"reflexive, focused" 1 agent/patient, 1 focus  [I taught myself
Linguistics]
"reciprocal": 2 agent/patient     sort of:[I taught him and he taught
me]
"reciprocal, focused" 2 agent/patient, 1 focus [ we taught each other
linguistics]
          {actually,  I think a better example is trade: [we exchanged
goods]}
"intransitive": 1 experiencer   [John learnt]
"intransitive, focused": 1 experiencer, 1 focus [John learnt
lingustics]

Actually, I lie. Some of that was taken from an essay "lexical
semantics" I found on the net. I forget who wrote it.

Anyway the conlang is VSO, so a verb followed by 3 nouns could mean
any of those things, with only the vowel sequence of the verb to
distinguish them. As the language rather hinges on the verbs, I'm a
little reluctant to press on until I'm sure I've covered all angles.
So can anyone here please suggest anything I may have missed.

Thanks!

JJ

(Oh, I can't help feeling that English is a very bad language in which
to discus this. Now I read  back through this message, I begin to
wonder whether "wonder" used at the top, is acutally NOT transitive,
after all. Can I "wonder this"? Comments anyone?)