Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity

On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 13:41:22 -0500, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

>I don't think there is an omitted preposition.  ?"I give to John the
>dog" is a very awkward, possibly ungrammatical, sentence.  The correct
>syntax is "I give the dog to John".
>
>In my view, "I give the dog to John" is derived from "I give John the
>dog" rather than the other way around.  The form with "to" is used to
>move "dog" to the position of primary object by demoting "John" from
>that position.
>
>Consider:
>I give John the dog -> John is given the dog
>I give the dog to John -> The dog is given to John
>
>In each case, the primary object (marked by being the first noun after
>the verb) is moved to subject position replacing the agent, the verb is
>made passive, and other features of the sentence remain.
In the sentence "I give John the dog," I think that the "primary object"
(i.e., the direct object) of the verb "give" is always "the dog," and never
John.  That is, the argument structure of "give" is "X gives Y (to Z)."
But I do think you're right that the sentence "I give the dog to John"
probably arose later; however, I think the use of "to" there is to erase
ambiguity as to what is being given and to whom.  The original word-order
was almost certainly "X gives Z Y," where Y is the direct object and Z is
the indirect object.

My whole point with this was to show that my conlang, OurTongue, handles
these things differently than English does, since OurTongue has explicit
case inflections.  Consider:

Jonele daru kuna.  "John is given the dog."
Kuna daru Jonele.  "The dog is given to John."

The literal translations of the OurTongue sentences are "To-John is-given
dog" and "Dog is-given to-John."  A sentence like "To John is given the
dog" would never be spoken by a native or fluent English-speaker, although
I would consider it grammatical.  With OurTongue, the difference
between "John is given the dog" and "The dog is given to John" is simply
word-order, since the grammatical functions of the nouns are determined by
their case endings.

In other words, English has a degree of ambiguity with verbs such as "give"
for historical reasons, while OurTongue does not.

- Rob

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