Re: Decomposed verbs (OOP-ish but applies to any lang)

>"John gave this red book to Mary" would be:
>Ka Ios dadro ni logien kat Mariai
>TP Jon-ERG book-ABS NI red-ABS this-ABS Mary-ILL
>
>Verblessly, this is "The red book, by John, to Mary." The temporal
particle
>|ka| is perfective -- it's finished happening -- and not strictly 'past
>tense'.
But, how would one know that "The red book, by John, to Mary"
means "John gave the red book to Mary" and not "John read
the red book to Mary" or even "John threw the red book at
Mary" ("at Mary" is a here recipient, not a locative)?

Your sentence is not just grammatically verbless, because
you've taken away also the *meaning* expressed by the
English verbs, leaving merely a group of arguments
marked for grammatical functions, I suppose with some
basic semantic reference ("by John" for macro-actor and
"to Mary" for macro-goal) but lacking a 'core' that
tells us of the semantic construct tying them together.

To go grammatically verbless without going semantically
verbless (which means going meaningless in cases like
the above), I'd go for something like "A gift, of the
red book, by John, to Mary", "A reading, of the...",
"A throwing, of the...", i.e. encoding the
relational and notional component of English verbs
into grammatical nouns (of course, in that language
'gift', 'reading', 'throwing' would be basic nouns
-nouns naming actions or events, like others would
name things, ideas, states or qualities...- and not
nominalizations of grammatical verbs, as neither
English adjectives -excluding participles- are
adjectivalizations of verbs like many adjectives
in Japanese).

Cheers,
Javier