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--- In Ladekwa@yahoogroups.com, Geoff Hacker <geoff.hacker@g...> wrote: > > Rick, > If 'translate' is an activity verb (i.e., AP-s), then this will lead to > inconsistencies in the semantic transformations between different activity > verbs. > Consider 'study', a verb that I do agree is an activity verb. When you say, > 'the student studied', the Agent and the Patient of the sentence are not > only the student, but it seems that they never stop being the student > throughout the different semantic transformations. For example, if you were > going to say, 'The student studied French', then this would be an AP/F-s > verb, with the Agent and Patient both being the student. I frankly can't > think of any other case structure that a word like 'study' could have. What > would the word become if you tried to make it A/P-s, for example? The most > that I can think of is that the Agent and the Patient would continue to be > the student, so that the verb would amount to saying that the student > made *tonti > *attempt to learn, or something like that. According to the Reflexive Suffix > section of the monograph, reflexivity is inherent in the AP form. This > relationship would then be made explicit by separating the A and P in the > sentence and using the reflexive pronoun *tonti *to represent the student > the second time. > Now consider trying to use 'translate' as an activity verb. In the sentence > 'the translator translated', the Agent and the Patient do still seem to be > the translator. But the second you separate the two cases, then suddenly the > Patient stops being the translator and starts being the thing to be > translated, as in the A/P-s sentence 'the translator translated the report'. > > In other words, the referent of the Patient across transformations is > inconsistent between the two so-called activity verbs. If you are happy with > this inconsistency, then fair enough. But it seems to openly contradict what > you say in section 2.5.1, that "A suffix changes the syntax and semantics of > a word in a precise (i.e., totally predictable) way." After all, you cannot > predict the way that the A/P-s suffix will change the semantics of an AP-s > word, because sometimes the Patient remains the same as the Agent, and > sometimes it does not. > Geoff I agree with Geoff. It seems we have to learn all derivations for each word, unless we can eliminate this inconsistency. Regards, Stephan