Elements of Style in English
in [Lisp]
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From: Cor on 13 May 2010 19:25 Some entity, AKA His kennyness <kentilton(a)gmail.com>, wrote this mindboggling stuff: (selectively-snipped-or-not-p) (snipped .....much) >>> tickled his mind, hit her brain, or boiled his blood, that writing is >>> great. >> >> By that definition, you fail. > > Who gets more attention than The Mighty Xah, wherever his pen treads? To boldy re-pen what other penned before. 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: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 13 May 2010 22:00 naddy(a)mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) writes: > Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > >> > > >> the need for a verb to have a subject, are first-semester >> > > >> stuff in any European language. >> > >> > > > Obviously, you don't know European languages. >> > >> > > In fact, Stan's claim is easily refuted [*] by translating the English >> > > "It's raining" into a few other languages. >> >> "It's raining" in Spanish is "Llueve" (literally "Rains") or "Esta >> lloviendo" (literally "Is raining"). > > In French, where personal-pronoun subjects are NOT optional, this > is "il pleut", with a dummy subject, just like English "it rains" > or German "es regnet". > > However, German offers at least two non-elliptical sentence types > where there really is no subject. All right. I'll admit that there may be sentences with verbs without subjects. My question really is whether this is a bug or a feature? That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? Or is it merely quirks in the languages, because of some laziness in finding the subjects? Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. Water droplets exists. In the action described by "there are water droplets", there is again a clear ontological subject to the action of existing. So I would argue, and this was the meaning of my objection, that these are "bugs" or irregularities of these languages. Can anybody exibit an action without a subject? -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Reinhold {Rey} Aman on 13 May 2010 22:19 Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > > Can anybody exibit an action without a subject? > Masturbating (_se branler_). No subject needed. :) -- ~~~ Reinhold {Rey} Aman ~~~ "El hombre es tantas veces hombre cuanto es el n�mero de lenguas que ha aprendido". -- Carlos I (Rey de Espa�a)
From: Peter Moylan on 13 May 2010 23:44 Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there > is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. Consider expressions like "it is raining cats and dogs" or "it was raining soup". It's clear that the things that are falling from the sky are the objects of the verb, not the subjects. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 14 May 2010 00:46
On 2010-05-13 22:00:21 -0400, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? Ontologically, a buddhist would say that it is not possible to have an action *with* a subject. i.e., the supposed subject is an arbitrary delineation within a completely interconnected continuum of phenomena: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra's_net> "It is raining," without any real subject, is, in this view, one of the few ontologically correct utterances one can make in english. It is the other "normal" sentences with their putative subjects which are ontological fictions. Everything that happens, just happens, just as rain just falls, and the wind just blows, without any single causal agent, other than the universe as a whole, that makes it happen. The need for a supposed subject to be the author of an action is just a linguistic fiction arising from the perceptual fiction of free will: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will> Presumably this perceptual fiction arose in support of the theory of mind: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind> which has obvious adaptive advantages for social primates, as it allows partial prediction of the actions of others. People who think that subjects actually exist often believe that the past and the future exist as well; that the present is an infinitesimally small, effectively non-existent junction between them. In fact, it's the other way round - there is only the present; the past is just a fragmentary and distorted recollection, not even universally agreed upon, and the future is just an imaginal creation of even less consensus. warmest regards, Ralph -- Raffael Cavallaro |