Re: Abandoning the Metaphysics of Subjects and Objects?

David wrote:
>>>
(1) The boy (2) stimulus* (3) the dog (4) by means of (5) sight.
"The boy sees the dog".
*I use this for an accusative for experiencer verbs.  If I were to put an
accusative in there, I'd think of it not as "seeing", but as "looking at".
Is this something like how All Noun worked?
I was just curious.  :)
-David
>>>
All-Noun Langages usually use...nouns only ;-) and no "conjunctive
particle".
They prohibit the predicate of the sentence to be expressed with a verb.
Since a phrase is made of a predicate and its actors, and since the
predicate is usually expressed with a "verb" (this includes a copula with or
without its bound actor, whether expressed or not), they have to inject the
predicate somehow and somewhere back in the phrase. So they give each actor
of the predicate a name (conveniently, a name is usually a noun) and they
list the actors with a little label stuck on them. The boy could get the
lable "seing one" or the dog "image", "stimulus" or whatever. Since the verb
is not around anymore, you may also pretend thet there was no valency of
core actors :-)) and you could add the capacity of seeing things ("sight")
or the result of that capacity ("sight") or the process of seeing ("sight")
as an actor labeled "instrument" or "capacity" or "result", etc. You could
have:
Boy=seeing one
Dog=seen one
Sight=seeing ability
We call this in French "Tourner autour du pot".
To sum it all up: Instead of naming the collective behaviour of the actors
with a "verb", they name the individual behaviour of each actor and then you
go figure what these individual behaviours end up doing together. A bit like
watching one image in a kaleidoscope. (There are natlangs that express one
english verb with a string of several verbs, but that's different.)