Re: conjugating by object

Quoting Jake X <starvingpoet@...>:

> > I would need an example of what you describe here, Jake, before I could
> comment.  What do you mean by conjugating verbs by their objects, and
> leaving the objects implied?   Do
> > you mean conjugating verbs by their objects and leaving the subjects
> implied?
> >        "She loved the cat."  How would you do that?
>
> Sorry that I didn't elaborate.  I would state the subject but not the
> object.  The object would be a kind of "trait," as it were, of the verb.
>
> So:
>
> She-NOM loved-3rd-SING-cat.
I think what you're talking about here is not object agreement,
but object incorporation, which is quite different.  Object
incorporation prototypically creates a more specific yet still
somewhat generic version of some verb, and is given its own
lexical entry such that speakers can usually identify whether
a given incorporated verb exists or not.  English has some
limited examples of object incorporation, which are taken as
prefixes of the root: e.g. "to duckhunt [or:  to go duckhunting]".
The agent of this verb is engaging in the generic activity
of hunting ducks, not hunting a specific duck. Likewise, it
is not a very productive process in English, although some
verbs are more amenable to it than others. "Hunt" is quite so:
"to lionhunt" does not seem all that strange to me, but
"to mortgage-amortize" is quite bizarre.  Some languages are
claimed to have "syntactic" noun incorporation, whereby the
object so incorporated appears to be modified by fully separate
constituents outside the morphological verb --  West Greenlandic
is the classic case, and I've found that Georgian has some
similar-looking examples -- but such languages do not seem to
be the rule.  (This was the subject of fierce debate between
Marianne Mithun and Jerrold Sadock about 20 years ago.)

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
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Chicago, IL 60637

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