Re: THEORY: Expressing the outcome of "productive" actions

Hi people, thank you for the responses so far! :-))

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 03:21:01 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

>Further, calling 'some words' a patient would be some kind of metaphor
>that treats abstract concepts as objects.  This metaphor strikes me as
>extremely normal, but of course, I'm influenced by the culture I grew
>up in!
>
Right. But what I am currently pondering is the following: Would it be
perversly odd to interpret speech acts (like shouting in my example
sentence) as concepts essentially similar to witchcraft? And if yes, then I
am eager to do exactly that! *lol*

Let me explain:

If the utterance "I shouted some words" could  be understood as "I turned
some words into a shout", then it would be related conceptually to the
sentence "The witch turned a flower into a dishwasher". Obviously then,
speech acts actually have two objects: the target of speech before the
conversion and, secondly, the target of speech after the conversion into
sound. Not _that_ strange actually. Think of a tool that technology has
given modern people: Text-to-speech software which bears this conversion
process right as its name! ;-)))

Anyway, the notion of "speech magic" makes me grin considerably. Something
for a not-very-usual conlang, I guess... :D

Cheers and a wonderful day plus weekend,
Harald
:-)))))

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