Search results for 'tag:Expressions tag:Direct objects' matching tags 'Expressions' and 'Direct objects'

Re: unexpected visitor

New2grammar — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:30:44 GMT

Avangi
What I'm really comfortable with is, "I opened the door a crack." "Door" is the direct object of "to open,"

You have a good point. Though open can be transitive or intransitive, I feel the original, I opened a crack, usage is transtive which is what makes the expression odd. I'll try not to use it.Thanks.

Re: the middle voice option

Dawnstorm — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:09:34 GMT

Hi,

I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think.

I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me.

First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and how you frame your terms. To me, ergativity in English is primarily a side topic to voice, and the only "marked" voice in English is the passive. All others rely on semantics and indirect evidence (such as your very detailled and useful post about the transitivity system in English). BUT: how do you frame the evidence there is systematically? In syntax? Make it part of the lexicon? In other words, what exactly is it that the term "ergative" adds to a combination of transitivity and lexical tagging? I'm still thinking about your suggestion to speak of "ergative structures" rather than "ergative verbs". This is an interesting approach, de-emphasising the lexicon in that respect; but I'm trying to ignore it for this post, mostly because I'm not done thinking it through.

Second, I think I've used the term "semantic" very loosely in my other post. There's reference, and then there's cognitive framing. (Or content and point of view.) The cognitive framing is harder to get at and interpret, mostly because these things aren't always immediately visible. We're talking about "ergative structures" in English, or the "middle voice", because we've noticed these constructions in other languages (Basque for ergativity; Ancient Greek for Middle voice; etc.). That is we have to strip away the structure and get down to the point-of-view meaning that the structures imply. And then we have to go back to English and look for expressions of said point-of-view meaning in this language. (Something similar is going on when linguists are probing "shall/will" along the lines of futurity/modality, within the discussion whether English has a future tense or not. The consensus is it doesn't, but the discussion - assuming "will/shall" as tense-modals - has been productive, if not conclusive.) But the thing is this: if you're bringing concepts to a language from outside (which is usual in comparative linguistics) you need an anchor; conventional structural methods - such as your "what syntactic operations yield well-formed usage?" approach - have their limitations. So do semantic (referential or framing). This makes ergativity/unaccusativity hard to think about, before you choose your approach.

Examples follow:

This is about the sentence, "He died a cruel death."

MrPedantic
The object here is a cognate object (it is implied in the verb itself) and thus belongs to a slightly different model. (I would say that it only exists to provide an adverbial opportunity: "he died a cruel death" = "he died in a cruel way".)

I agree that, framing-wise, the object functions much like an adverbial. But it's an "object" in syntax, which has implications that are incompatible with adverbials. Most relevant, here, "die" is now prone to passivisation.

"A cruel death was died," does sound odd (I'll get to it in a minute), but I wouldn't bat an eyelid at "Many deaths were died that night." Interestingly, it's hard to put this into the active voice, mostly because no subject seems appropriate. (?"The Soldiers died many deaths that night."; ?"The army died many deaths that night."...). To me, all the examples I can think of (plural nouns, collective nouns...) don't express the passive meaning. The closest I come is "Many people died that night." Anything else I can think of is of questionable grammaticality.

However, "A cruel death was died," although it sounds odd, doesn't sound ungrammatical in the least (at least not to me). It's also not a semantic problem; I understand the sentence perfectly well, both reference- and framingwise.

The reason, I think, this sounds odd is a pragmatic one. I think this one sounds odd because it's hard to find a context for this utterance that justifies the passive, which is a "marked construction". You generally expect "marked" constructions to be there for a reason. I suspect in the right context the above sentence would be perfectly fine. (It's a matter of Grice's conversational maxims, the maxim of manner, in particular.)

This is where the "frame-semantics" of syntactic constructions become complicated, I think. How do language structures tie in with cognitive structures (e.g. To what extent do we buy the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?)

So, from this I go to self-observation:

MrPedantic
and precisely because of that distinction, I would call "break" here ergative (ex. 5) , and "die" unaccusative (ex. 2).

See, I had the hardest time even to grasp what that meant, not now in this thread, but when I first discovered the distinction. That's because, learning English, I didn't train to see the difference. It wasn't necessary, as ergativity/unaccusativity isn't expressed through syntactic structures, but only indirectly through what operations are possible on the verb; this I pretty much took care off either through lexical list-tagging, or through collocation. If there is a hidden logic to it that I applied in learning, it never became conscious. (It's quite possible that I had a practical knowledge, but no discoursive one of this subject; but why, then, is it so hard to grasp?)

If we go back to the list and sift through the operations there, we'll find that "die" behaves different from "break" in the way we specified. But here's the catch: to apply that structural method, we have to assume that "break" in 5.a = "break" in 5.b = "break" in 5.c etc.; i.e. that "break" is the same lexical item in all these instances. That's because syntax has a hard time to differentiate between "signifier" and "signified", or "sign" and "concept".

Notice, for example, how your 5.a is already the transitive, while systematically it should be the intransitive agentive: 5.a *He broke. (i.e. "He caused/performed the action of breaking." as opposed to "He underwent the process of breaking," which is 5.b, now, and would be 5.c)

So I'd amend this, to:

5a. *He broke.

5b. He broke the plate

5c. The plate broke.

5d. The plate was broken.

5e. The broken plate

5f. The plate broke easily

And the comparison with "die" would be two-fold:

1. = sign; 2. = concept

5.1a He died.

5.2a He killed.

5.1b *He died the man.

5.2b He killed the man

5.1c The man died.

5.2c *The man killed.

5.1d *The man was died.

5.2d The man was killed.

5.1e *The died man [cf. The dead man.]

5.2e The killed man.

5.1f The man died easily. (<-- What's the difference to 5.1a? Should I add an * before it, as this is out of place, here?)

5.2f *The man killed easily. (<-- Is this not available, because 5.1f is available?)

5.1a, 5.1c, and 5.1f seem to be much the same. And this is the problem I have systematising a structural comparison. One possibility, I see is to re-cast 5a as reflexive 1. *He died himself./2. He killed himself. I might try to justify this through dying being a process you undergo, thus if you add an agentive/causative to core meaning (which is not in slot a, but in slot c) the verb becomes by necessity reflexive ("He caused himself to die.")

But these things are all a bit... tentative. I fear it's more rationalised than rational, if you get my drift.

[Interesting aside: you used the term "anticausative" alongside "ergative" and "unaccusative" for break in your thread. Bears repeating, as it's something I'm also still thinking about; a very interesting concept I haven't come across yet.]

MrPedantic
But I find a semantic difference too: the first presents the sign from the point of view of the reader, and the second, from the point of view of the writer.

Now, that's an interesting observation. I'd argue that the semantic difference is not referential (it refers to the same state of affairs), but it's a framing difference. If we view the sign as a proxy for the agent, we're importing the difference of active vs. voice into a construction that's free of the syntactic properties that normally accompany this framing device in English. "Reads," then, is ergative, while "says is a straightforward accusative verb (one that takes the accusative (which isn't marked in English - except, perhaps, for pronouns, where it's indistinguishable - morphologically - from the dative; the conventional term would be "direct object").

MrPedantic
Also, although the same few verbs tend to recur as examples in these discussions, actual usage is more imaginative.

That's what makes language so fascinating, isn't it? Nice example, there, too.

Re: what functional name?

Avangi — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 08:54:05 GMT

Hi, Anon,

I should probably keep out of this. I don't think they used the expression "complement" when I was in school. The type of action the verb describes often limits its function.

Transitive verbs take objects. "She hit him."

Intransitive verbs don't. "She matured."

Some verbs can be both. "She studied." (intransitive)

"She studied hard." (intransistive with adverb modifying verb)

"She studied until midnight." (intransitive with prepositional phrase modifying verb)

"She studied algebra." (transitive, with object of the verb)

"Verbs of being" "She is a model." (predicate nominative)

"She is beautiful." (predicate adjective)

Active "I permitted him to play." (infinitive is object of the verb, "him" is indirect object)

Passive "He was permitted to play" ("He" becomes the subject; the infinitive is still the direct object)

Intransitive "I felt sick to my stomach." ("sick" is an adverb modifying the intransitive verb "felt" ; the infinitive is an adverbial phrase modifying the adverb "sick")

"He felt inclined to argue with his brother." (ditto, plus a prepositional phrase modifying the infinitive)

Re: In according to?

Goodman — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:42:01 GMT

Schetin,

I am still trying to dial to the right frequency so that we can communicate. I am afraid I have failed because I realize we are not talking in the same wave length. I find your pattern of thought difficult to understand. I once heard this analogy "there is only a thin line between a moron and a wiz". I surely can't tell which one are you. You at times sounded smart but when listened carefully, the words coming out of your mouth proved otherwise. I think you like to talk in riddles to confuse people.

Would you care to elaborate? <<<Since Americans started their expansion by means of language, the rule "but don't ask me why" has become nearly universal. >>>

<<<There's a rule and it can be explained. That one thinks an expression sounds fine doesn't mean it is correct. I have explained why expression "in according" can't have preposition "to" - because it requires a direct object. Because the verb "accord" is transitive. ( I don't know what brand of English you are studying in Russia. In my 20 years of learning, I've never come across this explanation, Sorry!)You can't just accord, you have to accord [TO] something.

Accordance is a noun and can be used with preposition "with", "on", "of", about, whatever. (Wow! this is new to me)

It's not a matter of lexis - it's grammar.>>> (Really !!)

Re: In according to?

Yankee — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:58:23 GMT

Schetin wrote:
Yankee wrote:
She only stated that it was not the specific use that was the topic of discussion in this thread.

Since Americans started their expansion by means of language, the rule "but don't ask me why" has become nearly universal.
I find that to be an exceptionally unfair and unjustified statement. There are thousands of explanations from Americans about why something should or should not be said or written in a certain way on this site alone.

There's a rule and it can be explained. That one thinks an expression sounds fine doesn't mean it is correct. I have explained why expression "in according" can't have preposition "to" - because it requires a direct object. Because the verb "accord" is transitive. You can't just accord, you have to accord something. Yes, and you can "accord something to someone" and in this case the 'something' and the 'to someone' could theoretically end up reversed. It might be a somewhat unsual usage, but it wouldn't necessarily be grammatically incorrect.

Accordance is a noun and can be used with preposition "with", "on", "of", about, whatever. I don't recall disagreeing with you on this particular point.

It's not a matter of lexis - it's grammar.

Re: In according to?

Schetin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:33:10 GMT

Yankee wrote:
She only stated that it was not the specific use that was the topic of discussion in this thread.

Since Americans started their expansion by means of language, the rule "but don't ask me why" has become nearly universal.

There's a rule and it can be explained. That one thinks an expression sounds fine doesn't mean it is correct. I have explained why expression "in according" can't have preposition "to" - because it requires a direct object. Because the verb "accord" is transitive. You can't just accord, you have to accord something.

Accordance is a noun and can be used with preposition "with", "on", "of", about, whatever.

It's not a matter of lexis - it's grammar.

Re: sentence structures

Doll — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:40:52 GMT

5 Miss Kitty subject + was rude predicate + at the table adverbial +one day. adverbial

10 The earth subject+ revolves round predicate+ the sun. object

12 The sea subject + had predicate +many thousand sands.? object
Sentence Structure = Subject Verb Adverbial --This sentence is gramamtically wrong.

14 Borrowed garments subject+ never adverbial+ fit non-transitive+ well. predicate complement

17 Islamabad subject+ is predicate + the capital of Pakistan. subject complement

21 The beautiful rainbow subject+ soon adverbial + faded away. predicate.

24 The dewdrops subject+ glitter predicate + in the sunshine. adverbial

25 I subject+ shot predicate+ an arrow + direct object+ in the air. adverbial

26 A barking sound direct object+ the shepherd subject + hears. predicate
Sentence Structure = Ambiguity exists in the sentence. --You can see such expressions in the novels.

I am not a grammarian and it has been a long time since I didn't look over this subject. Well at least I tried myself.

Re: transitive verb and intransitive verb

Grammar Geek — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 03:30:10 GMT

Hello Dudumuzik,

Welcome to the forums.

A transitive verb requires a direct object. You picked a hard one - grammatically, we don't say "I knocked the door." There is an expression "knock wood," but it's an idiom.

Was your question specifically about the verb "to knock" or about transitive verbs in general?

Re: Difference between till & until

Marius Hancu — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:02:53 GMT

There's some differentiation between the two here, they seem to be considered synonyms only for the meaning 2:

---------
till

Function:preposition

1 chiefly Scotland a : to a place of arrival : through to : as far as <till an end> b : to or toward a limit or goal <changed till a dragon> c : TO -- used to introduce an indirect object or complement of various adjectives and nouns <gie it till him> <aye kind till his ain> d : AT, BY, FOR, OF, CONCERNING

2 : throughout the interval extending to : during the whole time from the starting point up to : up or down to a specified time : UNTIL -- used with an implication of termination or change at the time mentioned <till his return> <till after four o'clock> <till next week> <to live till ninety>

3 : at any time before or before the arrival, appearance, or beginning of -- used after a negative expression with an implication that the action or condition began or is to begin at the specified time <a refund which I did not get till ten years later>

4 -- used as a function word indicating position before the clock hour <five minutes till three>

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com
----------

Re: before

Cool Breeze — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 09:58:57 GMT

Hi Incho

I agree with the previous posters completely; I would just like to elaborate a little from a non-native speaker's standpoint to a non-native speaker. We're both foreigners, right?

Since there are hardly any inflections in English, the word order is very rigid and certain phrases and expressions are often placed wherever they are placed for no apparent reason. I'd like to suggest you get a good grammar book written with non-native speakers in mind and take a look at the chapter entitled Word Order in it. Grammars written by non-native speakers tend to be better for this.

I don't have enough time to deal with word order in detail here, but here are some basics.

Think twice before you place anything between the main verb and the object. It is often possible to put an indirect object between the two, and if the object is long, you may put something short between it and the verb. Examples:

I saw him there. OK
I saw there him. WRONG

I heard there the language of my childhood. OK
I gave him a book. OK

There are three safe places for adverbs and the like in a clause (A, B and C):

(A) He is (B) reading a book (C).

Some words can be placed in all these positions without any real change in meaning:
Now he is reading a book.
He is now reading a book.
He is reading a book now.

Position A:
Usually more emphatic than the other positions. Adverbs denoting time or place are often placed in initial position:
Yesterday I met an old friend.
In Dar es Salaam it rained all week.
On the table lay a book that had been there for quite a while.

Position B:
There are seven rules that govern the placing of expressions in position B, and that's a little too much for this post, so look them up in a good grammar book, please.
In brief, the most common words to appear in position B are adverbs of indefinite time: often, usually, always, never, ever, seldom etc. Words like also, again, now and many adverbs ending in ly can be placed in this position:

I have never been there.
He also likes our proposal.
I slowly realized what he had done.

Position C:
All manner of expressions can be placed at the end of a clause. The word empty helps you remember the right order: manner, place, time. If there are two expressions of place or time, the smaller place or the more exact time comes first:

He sang beautifully on his balcony at nine last night.

In your native language and mine, word order is much freer. In fact, I can put the words spring has come again in any order in Finnish and the meaning remains the same. Some alternatives are poetic and unusual, but they are all correct. In English, if you change the word order, you have a question: Has spring come again? Asking questions is not that easy in Hungarian, I assume.

Cheers
CB