Jasper
>Well, if you go along the Dowty path, then yes it is in that the
>agent role is assigned first. Of course we don't want to do anything
>so unpalatably procedural, but... The way I do things, the sense of
>intransitive verbs have ers and not ees because the single
>argument they have has properties associated with er and not with
>ee, though as I intimated just now this doesn't apply to states.
>Incidentally, we do need some mechanism for distingushing
>between the arguments of states because of this data from Dutch
>(also applies to Italian if Levin and Rappoport are to be believed):
>
>Ik heb mijn paraplu vergeten.
>I forgot my umbrella.
>Ik ben mijn netnummer vergeten.
>I forgot my dialling-code.
## Really?? Gosh - I don't think I was aware of this possibility before - I
thought 'be' was only possible with intransitives. (I'm pretty sure it is
in German; of course in French you get 'be' with reflexive verbs: "Je me
suis lave'" 'I have [am] washed myself'.)
>
>Telic Dutch verbs 'select their auxiliaries' on the basis of the
>semantic relationship between the referent of the subject and the
>result of the sense of the verb. If the subject refers to the 'thing the
>result state is predicated of' (I still say 'er' these days), then the
>auxiliary is ZIJN (atelic verbs always take HEBBEN).
## Yes, that seems right.
Richard (= Dick) Hudson
Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT.
+44(0)171 419 3152; fax +44(0)171 383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
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