Re: Unilang: the Grammar

Hi!

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:
> >    wo3 lai2 le0   tai2-wan1.
> >    I   go   PERF  Taiwan.
> >    (PERF is an aspect marker for a completed action but a non-completed
> > result)
> >    I've come to Taiwan.
> Indeed. If you look at your last example, Chinese uses "go" while English uses
Errm, no, sorry.  It should instead read

    wo3 lai2 le0   tai2-wan1.
    I   come   PERF  Taiwan.
    I've come to Taiwan.

`lai2' is `come', `qu4' is `go'.  Sorry...

But this implies that the speaker is still in Taiwan.  Otherwise, I'd
probably say the previous:

    wo3 qu4 guo4 tai2-wan1.
    I   go  EXP  Taiwan.

I.e., the speaker went and came back.

> For instance, if someone is in
> the garden of his house, explaining what he did two hours ago, he will say "I
> went in the house", never "I came in the house", because he's not in the house
> anymore, while in English both sentences are grammatical, depending on what you
> want to focus on.
Hmm...  I'd say

   liang2 dian3 qian3 wo3 hui2      jia1 le0.
   two    hour  ago   I   come-back home PERF.

That's yet another verb. :-)

Or do you mean that two hours ago, one went into the house and back to
fetch something and then out into the garden again?  That'd probably
be

   liang2 dian3 qian3 wo3 qu4 guo4 fang1-zi0.
   two    hour  ago   I   go  EXP  house

(The `guo4' indicates that the action is over and one went back to the
garden also.)

This uses `go'.  But would `lai2 guo4' be ungrammatical here?  I think
so, but I don't have any proof or experience.

But I'm not really sure.  Interesting question...

**Henrik