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

Hi!

Harald S. writes:
>... "I shouted 'Hello everybody!'" ...
>... "something red" ...
It would be the patient in all of my languages.

Analysing it, I think '"Hello everybody"' can well be argued to be the
same case role as 'some words' in 'I shouted some words.'  One is an
abstract description of an utterance, the other is an example of an
utterance, naming directly that very utterance that is shouted.  I
think the main difference is not case role, but level of abstraction.
So if I were to make the difference explicit, I'd not change the case
marking, but would introduce a marker for explicit examples, i.e., a
direct speech marker.

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!

The explicit marking reminds me of Mandarin Chinese that has a marker
for names: it is used (optionally, I think) after a name to make it a
name unambiguously, e.g.:

   Li3 shi4       Ya4zhou1 Shi2pin3 Gong1si1
   Li  <the_name> Asian    Food     Company

So this is not 'plum' but 'Li'.

**Henrik