Re: Case form of Participles used as Verb Compliments

From: George Blaisdell (maqhth@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 22 1999 - 11:46:17 EDT


>From: "clayton stirling bartholomew"

>I am only saying that natural language is untidy. If all the
>morphological forms had multiple simultaneous syntactical functions
>and all the semantic tokens had multiple simultaneous sense and/or
>reference
>then the difficulty of determining the sense of any given clause or
>paragraph would increase geometrically.

>If one was going to sit down and design a language there are certain
>language features one would want to avoid. Multiple simultaneous
>syntactical functions for a single instance of a morphological form
>in a
>single context, is a language feature which would cause nasty
>problems
>if it were not well constrained by other language features. It just
>so
>happens that in Indo-European languages this feature of participles
>is
>well constrained by other language features so that little ambiguity
>arises.

>I am sure that this is just so much gobbeldy gook to many b-greek
>people so I will drop it.

Hi Clay ~

One of the great and unsung [surprisingly so on this list] miracles to
my mind is that we can communicate by language at all! Simplicity of
words would seem to help, but carries the same confoundments ~ viz the
Fourth Gospel...

So we do the best that we can... Hope and prayer help...

XAPIS

George Blaisdell
Roslyn, WA

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