[b-greek] Decker on Olsen

From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2001 - 15:44:23 EST


Randall,

This is a bit cryptic. Lets see if I can decode it.


Randall Buth wrote:

> I would add that non-cancelability is unicorn.
>
By this you mean that non-cancelability is an inoperative notion since there
are no known examples of morphological markings being mapped to grammatical
functions in an absolute manner. Who would argue with that? Not I.

>
>Rodney also compared verbs to cases in his paper.
> Fine--consider that the five noun categories CERTAINLY
> map to multiple semantic roles.

Who can argue with this? Certainly the five noun categories MAP to multiple
semantic roles. That is not an issue. The question is what is the source of
the semantic information? My contention is that the semantic information
comes from just about anywhere else than from the case form.

A theory that proves everything proves nothing. The current approach to
assigning semantic roles (functions) to case forms allows the grammarian to
simply match up a hand full of examples where the genitive case marks a
constituent that specifies the material from which something is made and
then name a semantic category "genitive of material." This approach is a
non-starter. Too open-ended, lacking any controls.

> Proto-type theory is a way out of
> non-cancelability deadends.

What is Proto-type theory?

>
> Also--when comparing present imperfective and imperfect imperfective,
> 'remoteness' is much too weak an explanation, especially with the extremely
> high 99+% correlation of imperfect with minus-future and plus-past. There
> really doesnt' seem to be any question that the idicatives prototypically
> code for tense in addition to aspect.

Agreed.

>
> Sorry to be cryptic but i'm off to class.
>


Being cryptic is no problem.

Clay

--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062


BTW,

This response was delayed for two hours while I took time out to assess the
damage from a 7.x earthquake that transpired while I was writing it. I found
that having my monitor dancing around in front of me was somewhat
distracting. No major damage here. A few things broken. Worse quake we have
had since early 60's.



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