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Re: noun forms of verbs

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Monday, November 19, 2001, 12:44
Hi!

nicole dobrowolski <fuzzybluemonkeys@...> writes:
...
> there are other verbs that this works for as well but my question > is: would it be valid to say that "food" is a noun form of the verb > "to eat"?
Valid?! Of course, it's your language! :-) You may define whatever you wish to! :-) In Tyl-Sjok, which has nouns as the only class of content words, `food' can be used as a verb indeed meaning `to eat'. The reason is that Tyl-Sjok has a notion of default actions. If it is clear what is done to a thing, the thing can be used directly as a verb to denote the action on that thing. The full sentence for `I eat' in Tyl-Sjok would still be `I ingest food'. Because `ingest' is the default action for `food', you can say `I food', too. Other default nouns with default actions: car to drive water to drink, to wash, to water (depending on context) ... Default actions are an open concept in Tyl-Sjok, meaning that they depend so heavily on context that it is hard to list all possibilities. E.g. if the context is `to repair' (e.g. someone tells you they repaired their lawnmower), you are allowed to say: `I car, too' to mean `Yeah, and I repaired my car.' If your language also has this, the coercion to a verb would be ok in any case. Otherwise, I'd use a real verb to make the meaning clear. It would be a decision on how ambiguous/precise you want your language to be. **Henrik

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H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>