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Re: Abandoning the Metaphysics of Subjects and Objects?

From:takatunu <takatunu@...>
Date:Monday, August 25, 2003, 6:18
David wrote:
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(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
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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.)