tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun May 28 11:54:35 1995
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Re: What's wrong with "which"?
- From: [email protected]
- Subject: Re: What's wrong with "which"?
- Date: Sun, 28 May 1995 14:54:05 -0400
According to R.B Franklin:
> To me, "which" is similar to "what" and "who". "What" inquires as to one
of
> any conceivable possibility, "who" inquires as to what person, while
"which"
> inquires as to one of a particular group or objects or persons.
Reply by charghwI'
> This is my point, entirely. Unfortunately, we have no
> guidelines that I can recall for how to narrow the field. If
> you just put the question word (noun) after another noun, then
> you are either treating the question word as if it were
> adjectival (which doesn't work, since the word is not a verb)
> or you are making a possessive structure.
Is our interpretation of the noun-noun construction limited to a
possessive structure? I interpret it in a partitive way as well (this
comes from my experience with the genitive case in Irish). TKD
3.4 states:
The translation of two nouns combined in this way, say N1-N2,
would be N2 of the N1...An alternate translation would be N1's
N2...
IMHO, TKD doesn't limit us to possession, and using the question
words (if we expand our definition of "noun" to include them)
in a noun-noun construction would fall into a partitive contruct.
Again, the English words tend to trap us. While all genitive formations
can be written sensibly with "of" in English, not all can be written
with " 's ".
Brad