Re: Ditransitivity (again!)

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
> >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.
>
> Maybe it has something to do with another hardwired limitation, which seems
> to be that the human mind cannot handle more than around 7 entities
> simultaneously (i.e. our immediate memory is limited in size to around that
> amount).
Hmm ... just what exactly counts as a "core argument"?  I've always been
confused about that term.  I understand that "core arguments" are
generally taken to be nominative, accusative, and dative (or ergative,
absolutive, dative), but what makes those core, and cases like genitive,
instrumental, etc., oblique?

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