Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity
From: | Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...> |
Date: | Friday, May 30, 2003, 15:29 |
>Yet Chinese is not syntactically ergative either, because replacing _sui_
>'burst' with the syntactically equivalent verb _huang_ 'get flustered'
>produces a sentence meaning "The man dropped the melon on the ground
>and the man got flustered". In short, Chinese just doesn't constrain
>the meaning of such sentences syntactically, and so the listener's full
>semantic reasoner has to come into play in order to understand them
>correctly in context.
Hmm, I need to study more Chinese. This is the sort of approach I'm tarying
to take with Laafaah (if/when I get back to it - am temporarily stalled with
other non-conlang concerns.)
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