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

From:Muke Tever <hotblack@...>
Date:Tuesday, February 3, 2004, 18:46
On Mon, 2 Feb 2004 11:55:33 -0800, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
wrote:
> Syntactic arguments always seem questionnable to me. > When we say for ex that the verb “to love” requires > Agent and (Thing acted upon / Patient / Object) : > > - if the point of view is purely syntactic, then this > is not true. The French sentence “J’aime.” looks all > right, grammatically, to me. It means “I am in love”.
English is not the same as French. "Aimer" is not the same word as "to love", so we shouldnt be surprised to see a different syntax. [Perhaps it does not in French, but in English the intransitive of "love" seems unnatural or quite archaic.] Regardless of the *semantic* valence of a verb, which may be universal, the *syntactic* valence is tied to the word itself. For another example, "eat" and "dine" are synonymous, but "dine" cannot take a direct object--even though the meaning of the word requires there must be one, to include it in "dine" requires a separate phrase, generally "on X". *Muke! -- http://frath.net/ E jer savne zarjé mas ne http://kohath.livejournal.com/ Se imné koone'f metha http://kohath.deviantart.com/ Brissve mé kolé adâ.