Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

On 26 Apr 2004 Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:

> Thus, we could have an English verb like "to
> dog", for ex: I dog, he dogs, I dogged, I have dogged,
> etc., meaning I am a dog, he is a dog, I was a dog, I
> have been a dog (is this really useful ?)
  I don't know wether it is really useful or not, but the
predicative inflection on nominals seems to be a wide-spread areal
phenomenon in Eurasia, e.g. Turkish _asker-di-m_ 'I was a soldier,
lit. soldier-past-I' (cf. _gel-di-m_ 'I came, lit. come-past-I').

> But what I mean is that, if you have a verb meaning "to be a dog",
> first this can mean several things:
  But why is it a problem? The copula is also polysemantic in the
phrase "X is a dog", therefore it could be considered also
problematic...

> Then why wouldn't we have verbs like: - to be black
  Actually, Hungarian has such a word: "fekete'llik" (< "fekete"
'black'); and it has "kutya'lkodik" 'behaves like a dog' (< "kutya"
'dog').

> to be happy
  It's expressed by a verb from the basic Hungarian vocabulary:
"o:ru:l".

> to be dead (Rex is in a definite [irreversible] state of being-dead:
> Rex deads ?)
  This example shows the relativity of the problem: the negative
concept can be a verb also in English: "live, exist".

> - to be in another place (spatial concept: Rex absents ?)
  I remember a Latin verb _desum_...

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