Re: inverse constructions
| From: | Gerald Koenig <jlk@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Saturday, November 6, 1999, 7:40 |
|---|
>From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
>Subject: Re: inverse constructions
>Gerald Koenig wrote:
>> The verb and its 3 arguments total 4 elements forming the basic
>> grammatical structure of a full sentence. Just as we have 2 dimensional
>> structures, such as writing, we can have 2 dimensional languages, as
>> attested by Nick, but they are not fully formed. They seem suited to a
>> "flatland" of fiction, not a relativistic universe. It would be
>> interesting to know the cultures they thrived in, and what was
>> hierachical structure there. They seem less suited to describe a three
>> dimensional world.
>
>Hunh? I'm sorry, but I don't think that this is a valid analogy. A lot
>of language have no cases, does that make them "zero dimensional"?
>Besides, those languages that only have two or no (one?) cases simply
>use word order and/or adpositions to compensate for it. For instance,
>consider the English sentence "John gave the boy the gift" - word order
>distinguishes between "nominative", "accusative", and "dative" - dative
>can also be distinguished by the preposition "to" as in "John gave the
>gift TO the boy"
>
Hi, Nik,
I think I misunderstood your first post. I thought you had said that
there were languages with less than 3 case-roles, as opposed to less
than 3 grammatical forms to represent case-roles with. I was thinking
only of the actual functions that arguments to verbs have, not the forms
that they take in various languages. Sorry for the confusion, this was
a new idea and not well formulated.
Jerry