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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.) _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus