tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Mar 04 05:23:30 1994
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Adjectives and vIH
- From: [email protected] (Mark E. Shoulson)
- Subject: Adjectives and vIH
- Date: Fri, 4 Mar 1994 16:05:10 -0500
- In-Reply-To: "d'Armond Speers"'s message of Fri, 04 Mar 1994 13:18:04 -0500 (EST) <[email protected]>
>From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
>Date: Fri, 04 Mar 1994 13:18:04 -0500 (EST)
>With regards to the discussion concerning adjectives & vIH:
>We've all read the quote from TKD p. 78-79, but so far noone's
>mentioned an equally-relevant quote, from p. 49:
>"A verb expressing a state or quality..."
>It seems to me that vIH does indeed express a state, the state
>of being in motion, and as such can be used in this way. It's
>not the inclusing of the English "to be" in the definition,
>but the thematic nature of the verb itself.
Ah... well, my position on this has long been that it depends on the nature
of the verb, whether or not it is stative or active in meaning, not in the
translation that Okrand felt like giving it/was forced into giving it by
the nature of English. However, this opens up the can of worms which you
have demonstrated: different people will consider different verbs stative.
"The state of being in motion" may not be any more "stative" to someone
than "the state of being engaged in running" or "the state of being engaged
in hitting one's head against a wall". Recall that in colloquial English,
just about *all* present-continuous verbs are expressed as participles with
the help of "to be". That doesn't necessarily make them all stative (but
then you noted that you weren't relying on the nature of "to be"). But
we'll get into some pretty unproductive catfights mighty quick if we start
arguing about unquantifiables like this, where we're relying on our
instincts, which differ among reasonable people. The best you can do is to
follow your own and either accept others' usages or or note that they don't
align with yours and leave it at that. If the other person rethinks it and
decides you're right, fine. Otherwise, I don't think anyone has a monopoly
on judging which verbs are "stative in nature".
>Holtej
~mark