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Wow, here I was going to email Rick with some questions, but stopped by here first, only to find he's gone for the foreseeable future. Maybe some of you guys can shed some light on my confusions? --------------- I've been a fan of Latejami since the time it was Katanda. :) Lately I've been designing a language of my own using your breakdown of verbs (using triliteral roots, if you're interested) and going over the latest monograph with a fine-toothed comb for insights. I've developed a number of questions about verbs, if you don't mind. Possibly some of them may be of use for future drafts too, I have no idea. 1. All verbs have a patient, and all action verbs also have an agent, I agree. But lately I'm wondering if ALL verbs, even state verbs, have an agent: Whether P/F, for example, is really the same as P/F [-A]. Take "The sky is_blue." Isn't that just a middle voice version of A/P-s sentences like: Scattered sunlight makes the sky blue. (Or "blues the sky", if you prefer.) The will of God makes the sky blue. The nature of things makes the sky blue. Collective hallucination makes the sky blue. Or am I wrong, and there is a real semantic difference? If so, what is it? 2. On a similar note, you state in section 2.9 of the monograph that unfocussed verbs that are focussed by default are the same as the focussed versions with the focus "middled away", so to speak. You further state that the semantics is different for verbs that are not focussed by default, and come back to the matter in section 4.5. It may well be that I'm simply being dense here (I'm not very familiar with middle voice), but for the life of me I can't see how any of the examples in section 4.5 are any different from the focussed-by-default cases. To take just one, A/P-s: "John managed the company." vs. A/P/F-s: "John managed the company in its overseas operations." How does the former differ from the middle-voice version of the latter? I'd gloss it as something like, "John managed the company in operations too obvious or redundant or unimportant to be worth mentioning." If I am just being stupid here (entirely possible), perhaps some additional language in 4.5 would help. But anyway, in the end I wonder if all verbs are really just voice-derivations from A/P/F-x. 3. Ignoring both the above questions for the moment and assuming that the twelve argument structures really are fundamental, do you ever find that multiple voice operations are actually useful? I've been playing around with it, and I've yet to find any reasonable verbs which required more than one. 4. Should the copula "dapa" really be glossed as "to be the same as"? I question whether "to be the same as" is at all the same as (pardon the pun :) "having the state of". My mind rejects glossing "Jumbo is an elephant." as "Jumbo is the same as an elephant." "Jumbo", a tangible thing, can't possibly be the same as an abstraction like "an elephant". Shouldn't it rather be, "Jumbo has the state of being-an-elephant"? Your explanation of "dapumbe" and "fesumbe" in 4.3.9 - equating "to/into" to "becoming the same as" - seems even more troublesome. To take one of your examples, "The crowd shouted itself INTO A FRENZY," "the crowd" is assuredly not the same as "a frenzy." If I'm right, "dapo" would gloss as, "Having the prototypical qualities of a generic subject that has an unspecified state". Which admittedly does not seem at all useful in itself, but is, as you say, quite useful as an open adjective or case tag letting you specify the state. Certainly the equality relation is worth a root, but I think it will mainly see use in mathematics and discussions of definitions. (Where it's been plaguing me all through this section! :) 5. In previous drafts, you've listed "ironic" and "odd" as possible new modals. Now they're gone. May I ask in what way they fall short of being modals? They sure seem to me to fit all the tests: They're subjective yet impersonal, not implying approval or disapproval. I approve of the addition of "reasonable/sensible", but note that it isn't yet mentioned in the main text. (And a random wondering: Just why is it so hard to think of new modals? Especially deontic ones! Are there just plain not many of them? Or is it because we resist making impersonal judgements? :) If someone says, "It's important that John leaves now," how do you respond with the question, "Important to whom?" in the interlingua? 6. This sentence in 2.7.1 always makes me ponder: "I do not feel that grammatical voice change should be implemented in syntax - syntax is not nearly as flexible as morphology." I'm having trouble wording my question, but it'd be something like, "Why do you need a lot of flexibility to express voice changes?"`