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on 2/16/04 9:45 AM, HandyDad at lsulky@hidden.email wrote: > We shouldn't drop the indirect object into the prepositional phrase > bucket, as I was earlier suggesting. I think I follow. "I throw you the ball" You is ind ob. Go tir to boli zi. But, "I throw the ball into the house" the prep phrase, by our standards, is the indirect obj, right? Go tir to boli (faq) dan to dom. This makes sense, but how do we prevent bolidan or bolifaq or bolifaqdan or faqdan from forming as compounds? Practically, we don't need to worry about this, but it keeping with making ceqli able to disambiguate completely, we do need something. What would Go tir to boli te dan to dom. mean? Can the 'te' make 'dan to dom' into a noun phrase that is then unambiguously an ind ob? > > The problem was that I got myself confused between prepositional > phrases that act as adverbs and prepositional phrases that express > indirect objects. I was thinking that it was too hard for non- > linguists to tell the difference between them, but it isn't, because > a verb simply cannot have more than ONE indirect object (though it > might be a compound phrase, like "to man and to dog"). Even though > Loglan tried to construct verbs of four and even five places, really > the most places a verb can have is three: subject, direct object, and > indirect object (I think the linguistic terms are agent, focus, and > patient). > > So we don't need an infinitely expandable way to mark verb places; we > only need three. By default we mark subject and direct object by > position. If we can mark the indirect object clearly, perhaps with a > very special functional word, then any other prepositional phrases > just go wherever they ought to go to modify subject, object, indirect > object, or -- for that matter -- verb. So first I'd like to narrow > down how we mark the indirect object, and then discuss where > prepositional phrases (which by definition are NOT the indirect > object) ought to go. > > Make sense? > -- Rex F. May (Baloo) Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/book-GesundheitDummy.htm