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Re: Ditransitivity (again!)

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 28, 2004, 12:59
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). Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>