Re: Core Cases (was Re: Ditransitivity (again!))

How do you deal with verbs of elaboration and transformation?

make: maker, thing made
sculpt: sculpter, scultped material, sculpture


"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...> wrote:
<<<<<
Ebisedian's seemingly strange case system is actually just a simple
application of this model: it dispenses with the requirement that one of
the semantic roles (eg. the subject in accusative langs) is mandatory, and
uses a 5-element semantic role set: originative (source), receptive
(destination), instrumental (means), conveyant (that which was affected),
locative (locus). (Arguably, the locative is a secondary role and needn't
be considered here.) The Ebisedian mappings for "kick", "see", and "give",
for example, are:

        kick: kicker -> O       person kicked -> R
        see:  seer -> R         thing seen -> O
        give: giver -> O        thing given -> C        recipient -> R

The mappings for "see" may seem odd, but only because the accusative
mindset is used to thinking about agents and patients. In Ebisedian,
agents and patients are irrelevant; the semantically important concepts
are source and destination: from whence did the event originate, and to
what is it directed at, rather than who/what did it, and who/what
underwent it. So actually, "kick" and "see" share the same mappings; it's
just a matter of ordering verb arguments the Ebisedian way.
>>>>

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