tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Jul 06 21:23:24 2000
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Re: Deixis and direction
> jatlh charghwI':
> > I can see why, for a certain abstraction of the grammar, it might be
> useful
> > to group together these different grammatical functions as you have, but
> to
> > declare that differentiating among them is baseless is a bold statement
> that
> > I find useless.
Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention in this part. I'm not saying that
differentiating among the various sorts of header nouns is a bad thing or
baseless. It's a good thing. TKD does it. You need to understand the
difference between a locative and a beneficiary, for instance, so that you
can use them correctly (saying /DujvaD/ when you're trying to express the
concept of "location of the ship" or "inside the ship" is obviously wrong).
I'm saying that their difference is in their meaning, not their grammatical
structure. (If I did use /DujvaD/ instead of /DujDaq/ for the example
above, I'd have gotten the wrong noun, not the wrong grammar. /DujvaD/ is a
noun, not a noun plus grammar.)
One can speak syntactically correctly while saying semantic nonsense. TKDs
"differentiation" of these nouns also helps one understand which is
appropriate to use. It doesn't prescribe grammar regarding these, it
illustrates what "works" and what doesn't.
SuStel
Stardate 515.2