Re: Some Thoughts on Word Classes
Rob Zook 
Mon, 24 Aug 1998 09:36:54 -0500

Saul Epstein wrote:

> Quotes from: Rob Zook <lalaith*unicom,net>
> Date: Thursday, August 20, 1998 10:12 PM
>
> > At 08:06 PM 8/20/98 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote:
> > >So here's another possible set of classes...
> > >
> > >    1. Action
> > >    2. Entity
> > >    3. Deixis
> > >    4. Quality (or State)
> > >    5. Quantity
> > >    6. Operation
> >
> > Hmmm, I was actually thinking that we could better roll
> > state into relations, maybe we should discuss this a little more :)
>
> Of course.
>
> Let's discard "relation" for the moment, because it fails to really
> say what needed saying, and go back to the ZC...
>

Er, hmmm, yup. In that case, nevermind what I said about relations :)

> We have actions, such as to stop, to walk, to kill, to eat, to live,
> and to die. We have states, such as existant, dead, and alive. We
> have entities. We have qualifiers, such as red and quickly.
>
> In the ZC, actions and states are classed together. This makes an
> intuitive kind of sense, I think, because English (like many other
> languages) uses a verb construction to form a sentence to express a
> state. ("The captain *is* dead.") But if a sentence refers to an
> entity's state in the process of expressing something else, this verb
> construction is not used. ("I mourn the dead captain.")
>
> This exactly matches the way entity-qualifiers are used. ("His blood
> *is* red." / "The sand drinks his red blood, just as it would a
> Vulcan's.") So my suggestion is that saying "a state of deadness
> characterizes the captain" is structurally very similar to saying "a
> quality of redness characterizes his blood." Our words like "dead"
> suggest a similarity to actions, I think, because they are derived
> from verbs; whereas our words like "red" aren't (at least, not
> obviously).
>
> So, I think, one could say <mata keptan> to mean "the captain is
> dead;" and <th'laktra mata keptanhi> to mean "I mourn the dead
> captain." (Or, to make the captain the subject, <ewl'hont
> entarpryz'hi mata keptan>, "the dead captain haunts _Enterprise_.")
>
> Is that any clearer? Or did I miss what you wanted to discuss? ;-)

Well, I probably wanted to get into a nasty philosophy of language snarl

involving relations/states and entities, but we can ignore that for now
:)

Oddly, enough this sounds very similar to something I was trying to
explain to you, a few months back. But regardless, yeah that's how I
read the section on qualifiers too.


Rob Z.