Elements of Style in English
in [Lisp]
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From: Stan Brown on 15 May 2010 06:45 Sat, 15 May 2010 12:56:16 +1000 from Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>: > > Stan Brown wrote: > > And in French we have "il y a une maison", again with the dummy > > subject "il". But the corresponding English is "there's a house". > > What is the grammatical function of "there"? > > > In meaning, it's the same as the "y" in the French sentence: at that > place [1]. Grammatically, though, it's a little different, because "y" > is a dative pronoun while "there" is an adverb. Yes, but ... "There" is indubitably an adverb in "A house is there". But is it really in "there is a house"? The two sentences don't mean the same thing: one is about location and the other about existence. We can say "there is a good reason for granting clemency" but not "a good reason for granting clemency is there". In sentences of the form "there is X", what is the subject of the sentence? If "there" is an adverb then X must be the subject, but that seems strange to me because of the placement. I know that sentences can be inverted, but this doesn't feel like inversion to me, because of the difference of meanings. Maybe I'm trying to pigeonhole something unclassifiable. When I was in school, we diagrammed sentences, and I got the idea that every sentence is diagrammable. "How do you do?" is, even though it would be pretty hard to glean the actual meaning of the sentence from that diagram. But maybe "there is a house" isn't diagrammable. > Translate back into French again, and you get "Voil� une maison". I > don't know what part of speech "voil�" is considered to be these days, > but historically it must have been an imperative. ("See there".) > > All of which seems to mean that these existential expressions can occupy > any grammatical niche, depending on which language you choose and which > exact wording. It would seem so. Or should we say "any grammatical niche, or none"? -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai...
From: Peter Moylan on 15 May 2010 09:43 Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > "Peter Duncanson (BrE)" <mail(a)peterduncanson.net> writes: > >> On Fri, 14 May 2010 21:08:42 -0400, Stan Brown >> <the_stan_brown(a)fastmail.fm> wrote: >> >>> Fri, 14 May 2010 04:00:21 +0200 from Pascal J. Bourguignon >>> <pjb(a)informatimago.com>: >>>> That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? >>> A good question. "Il pleut" and "it's raining" *look* like subject- >>> verb, but they're not really. More accurate would be "La pluie see >>> tombe"(*) or "Rain is occurring". >>> >>> (*) I'm sure there's a better way to say that. >>> >>> But I know very little of modern grammar. >> Me neither. >> >> With sentences such as "It is raining" and "It is sunny" it is possible >> to describe them as ways of saying "Rain is falling" and "The sun is >> shining" or something similar. How about "It is dry" and "It is dark"? >> They describe a condition in the same way as the other sentences. Sun >> and rain can be thought of as "substances", physical entities, which >> come from somewhere. "Dry" and "dark are not "substances". > > Ask yourself who or what is dry or dark. > For "it is dry" you could say "the weather is dry". For "it is dark" I would have to say something like "the lighting is dark". The "it" in these sentences could be interpreted as meaning "the general environment". It's ugly, though. Would you really be willing to accept "the general environment is raining"? It makes more sense, to me, to say that "It is raining" is a hypercorrection for "Is raining", and likewise for the other examples. The sentence "Is raining" (which is grammatical in several European languages) has a meaning that everyone can understand. Requiring that the verb must have a subject is an artificial constraint that, while possibly satisfying someone's ideas about how an artificial language should work, is entirely a grammatical constraint rather than a semantic constraint. In this connection, it is worth mentioning that Esperanto - an artificial language, therefore a language supposedly free of at least some constraints - translates "it is raining" by "pluvas": a verb without any subject. Several other languages do the same thing, which I think is sufficient to demonstrate that verbs without subjects are possible. If you want to respond that something is doing the raining, I would reply that that is a question of theology rather than language. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Peter Moylan on 15 May 2010 09:59 Stan Brown wrote: > Sat, 15 May 2010 12:56:16 +1000 from Peter Moylan > <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>: >> Stan Brown wrote: >>> And in French we have "il y a une maison", again with the dummy >>> subject "il". But the corresponding English is "there's a house". >>> What is the grammatical function of "there"? >>> >> In meaning, it's the same as the "y" in the French sentence: at that >> place [1]. Grammatically, though, it's a little different, because "y" >> is a dative pronoun while "there" is an adverb. > > Yes, but ... > > "There" is indubitably an adverb in "A house is there". But is it > really in "there is a house"? The two sentences don't mean the same > thing: one is about location and the other about existence. We can > say "there is a good reason for granting clemency" but not "a good > reason for granting clemency is there". Let us paraphrase, then. In such sentences "there is" is a way of saying "exists". So "there is a house" is another way of saying "exists a house". Some purists, I suppose, would insist that this should be "It exists a house" - I have seen that suggestion in a forum I once inhabited - but they end up admitting that the "it" is a dummy subject. The only reason for introducing dummy subjects is to satisfy the rule that - in some languages, but not in others - every verb must have a subject. This is a particularly strong rule in French, where "il y a" definitely requires the dummy subject "il". (A subject that is omitted in at least some examples of "street French". L'Acad�mie might rule on what gets into the dictionaries, but not on what is spoken.) It is a slightly weaker rule in English; most of the time we require a dummy subject, but I suspect that we could find counterexamples. It is not at all a rule in Spanish, to name just one example. I have wondered at times whether this is because English has only one "be" verb, where some other Indo-European languages have two verbs. I doubt that I'll ever find the answer. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Cor on 15 May 2010 10:12 Some entity, AKA Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp(a)retep>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) > In this connection, it is worth mentioning that Esperanto - an > artificial language, therefore a language supposedly free of at least > some constraints - translates "it is raining" by "pluvas": a verb > without any subject. Several other languages do the same thing, which I > think is sufficient to demonstrate that verbs without subjects are possible. But do not forget that esperanto, being 'artificial', it does lean heavily on latin and the romanic-language-family heritage as to its choice of its vocabulary and other 'rules'. It was born in a time where any 'scolar//educated person' had a working knowledge of latin. Cor -- Join us and live in peace or face obliteration If you hate to see my gun consider a non criminal line of work I never threathen but merely state the consequences of your choice Geavanceerde politieke correctheid is niet te onderscheiden van sarcasme
From: Stan Brown on 15 May 2010 12:50
Sat, 15 May 2010 10:52:40 -0400 from Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com>: > On 2010-05-14 23:27:15 -0400, Jerry Friedman said: > > > How would we say "The snow covered the rock" if we didn't have that > > illusion? > > "Snow on rock," (note the absence of any active agent "doing" the "covering.") But those aren't the same thing. "Snow on rock" could indeed mean "the snow covered the rock". But it could equally well mean "the snow is covering the rock", "the snow is falling onto the rock", "there is a patch of snow covering part of the rock", and so forth. -- Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA http://OakRoadSystems.com Shikata ga nai... |