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> > I suppose what I'm asking is: Why does Katanda have > > core arguments at all? > > You have to express syntactic relationships in some way, so why not do > it in the same way that most natural languages do it? Because I think there are likely to be better ways. Simpler, more elegant, more expandable, and perhaps less likely to be confused by idioms in native languages. > Keep in mind that nominative/accusative and ergative/absolutive case > marking systems do, in fact, mark core roles. The only languages that I > know of that do NOT mark core roles, but which instead mark semantic > roles, are the trigger languages of the Philippines. It seems to me that the optimal structure of a translation interlanguage is one that allows even the most eccentric semantic constructions in natlangs to be represented accurately, eg. a proposition with an implied verb, a promoted instrument, and no patient. The issue of how most natural languages mark semantic roles is, I think, not really relavent when deciding which interlanguage structure is optimised for that kind of purpose. It may be metaphysically nieve of me, but I believe the designers of an interlanguage should look for ways to encode the meaning of utterances, and not worry *at all* about preserving the surface forms within the representation. -- Kapitano