Re: A ravening of ravens

On 3/29/06, Ph.D. <phil@...> wrote:
> Mark J. Reed wrote:
> >
> > I'm sorry, but I completely fail to see how either
> > "to rent" or "to cleave" is its own antonym.  What
> > am I missing??
> "To rent" is not really its own antonym, but perhaps
> the original poster was referring to the fact that a
> landlord rents a property (so he's "giving" it to
> someone else) and a tenant rents a property (so
> he's "taking" it from someone else).
So, switching the agent of a ditransitive verb
with its source/recipient (leaving its patient the same),
without any explicit marking.  That's consistent
with English's tendency to vary the valency or argument structure
of many verbs without any explicit marking.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry