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

* Harald S. said on 2005-10-26 21:37:15 +0200
> A bright and shining hello to the list! :)))
>
> Being a regular reader but rare poster who conlangs to research
> language as such to discover its mechanisms and paradigms, I herby
> delurk and want to share one thought about semantics that I have seen
> mentioned nowhere else so far.
Hello and welcome!

> In the sentence "I shouted 'Hello everybody!'", the text 'Hello
> everybody!' is not the shout itself but rather the wording of my shout
> (being the acoustic consequence of me shouting) which was set free by
> me as the agent.
In Taruven the "Hello everybody" would be the same as whatever you
call the X in "VERB about X", "VERB that X", "VERB to X" etc.
In the first case X is usually an NP, in the middle X is a sentence and
in the last X is... well... an infintive and but in the two other X is a
sentence.

Hmm... "complement" maybe? If an NP it is marked for benefactive and if
a sentence it ain't marked, all nice and simple.

Not very deeply analyzed - but that means you fill in a slot instead of
analysing what you need to say before you need to say it, so, IMHO, more
effective.

> Analyzing another example, let us consider "She paints something red
> on the blackboard". "something red" does not appear to me like a mere
> elaboration of the event. It rather looks like an object being acted
> on and, thus, seems to be the patient of the sentence.
You have an ambiguity there, "something red" can mean (at least) two
things:

a) something that is red (an apple, a rose, a Ferrari...)
b) red splotches (the speaker cannot make out anything but the color)

So there's evidentiality involved in that humble sentence!

In Taruven, either would be treated as a patient, and there's a similar
effect in a sentence like "We named him 'John'.", what is the role of
"John" here? In Taruven, once again John would be marked as a
patient/object.


t.

Reply