Re: Ditransitivity (again!)

Quoting Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...>:

> > And what are 'tritransitives'?
>
> Add one to ditransitive! While I am no longer
> convinced that ditransitive means just the
> ability to take two objects, tritransitivity
> would take three objects. If you can think of a
> verb that requires a direct object an indirect
> object and some third object (a time, a place, a
> means, etc) then that would be tritransitive.
I read somewhere that there's a universal stating, in the terms of this
discussion, that no human language has any tritransitives.

It was argued that a verb like "to sell" logically should have four core
arguments - the seller, the buyer, the thing sold and the payment - but that,
for some reason, no known language has verbs that take more than three core
arguments, so one of those arguments can only be introduced as an oblique (in
the case of English "to sell", the payment; "he sold me the book for ten
euros"). The conclusion drawn, IIRC, was that this limitation is hardwired
into the language-handling parts of the central nervous system.

                                                            Andreas

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