by J. L. Speranza
--- for the Grice Club.
I AM LEARNING the lesson (in chemistry, etc.) from Kramer, but till then, I'll stick with 'ambiguous'. Surely his chemical word is the one to use!
But here is the ref. under 'sink' in the online etymological dictionary. There was a comparison with 'drink' and 'drench', so I looked up "drench" to get:
"drench -- from Old English drencan
"cause to drink," causative of drincan "to drink,"
from Proto-Germanic (hypothetical form) drankijan"
At this point I would think that drencan -- pronounced /drenkan/ -- and 'drincan' -- pronounced /drinkan/ were different words.
This may relate to what Grice calls the modified Occam's razor -- "senses should not be multiplied beyond necessity".
He and Ockham means 'of the same word'. But since 'drincan' and 'drencan' were different words, surely they can have different senses.
So the problem is, typically, with the Beatles and modern English in general.
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From wiki 'causative':
ReplyDelete"All languages also have lexical causative forms (such as English rise → raise)".
So, the Anglo-Saxon sometimes dropped this parsimony and sometimes he didn't. "rise" and "raise" were different in Anglo-Saxon AND in modern English. 'sink' is NOT different (from 'sink') in modern English, etc.
There is more about the 'drankijan' in wiki for 'causative'. It was a formative thing back in the day:
ReplyDelete"In Proto-Germanic, the parent language of the Germanic dialects including English, the causative form of a verb is made by adding the affix (hypothetical) "-j" to the verbal stem (generally raised to the o-grade in classes I-IV). The resultant causative stem is always weak.
(hypothetical)
ƀeitanan (I) "to bite" → (hypothetical) ƀaitjanan "to bridle, yoke, restrain", i.e. "to cause to bite"
(hypothetical) ƀeuǥanan (II) "to bend" →
(hypothetical) ƀauǥjanan "to bend", i.e. "to cause to bend"
(hypothetical)
ƀrennanan (IV) "to burn" →
(hypothetical) ƀrannjanan "to burn", i.e. "to cause to burn"
(hypothetical) fallanan (V) "to fall" →
(hypothetical) falljanan "to fell", i.e. "to cause to fall"
If I mentioned 'make' in causativity, add: "have".
ReplyDeleteFrom wiki, causative:
"Periphrastic causativity
There are no regular causative inflections in English, nor in any of the major European languages, which resort to idiomatic uses of certain verbs like English "make" or "have"."
Odd point about 'periphrastic causativity' in wiki, causatives:
ReplyDeletei. She made me eat the vegetables.
ii. I had John build the house.
iii. I had the posters taken down.
"Note that this type of structure is ... complicated: ... it has two verbs and three arguments."
"The first is the subject of the first verb."
"The second is the object of the first verb but also the subject of the second."
"The third is the object of the second verb."
COROLLARY:
"These arguments can be exchanged using passive voice (in either verb), but the result can be cumbersome or even ungrammatical."
Not for Grice!
The point I was making about Italian 'si' is reflected in wiki, causatives:
ReplyDelete"In the Romance languages, a number of verbs alternate between intransitive (semantically middle voice) and causative transitive, using a pseudo-reflexive clitic pronoun:
i. Ella se despierta a las 7.
"She wakes up at 7."
ii. Ella despierta a los niños.
"She wakes up the children."
And SHE, of course, sinks the Bismarck.
Part of the appeal here is the zero degree of implicature: I'm borrowing from Barthes!
ReplyDeleteAgain, from wiki, causatives:
"Lexical causativity. In many cases, a language simply uses a different lexical item to indicate a causative form. For example, the causative of English "rise" is "rear" --
-- I once did this with the OED. They are cognate.
"and the causative of 'eat' is 'feed'. English allows a notable freedom in verb valency, resulting in verbs like 'break', 'burn' or 'awake'"
i.e. Grice's 'variable polyadicity or n-adicity.
"which may be causative or not (
'he burns it' = he causes it to burn). Causativeness is therefore zero-marked in many English verbs."
and trust Grice to find that _re_-markable.
This from the section on 'syntax' in wiki, causatives, which sort of confirm the idea that when Grice speaks of 'structure' he means syntactic structure, even if he is, like I am, more interested in the logical syntax than in the artificial arbitrary parameters of this or that lingo (I'm usuing 'artificial' artificially).
ReplyDelete"Causative syntax. A causative form or phrase can be thought of as a valency-increasing voice operation, which adds one argument. If the original verb is intransitive, then the causative construction as a whole is transitive:
to fall → to make (sbdy./sthg.) fall, to topple (sbdy./sthg.), or indeed, to fell, a fossilised form from when causatives were an inflexional part of English grammar. If the original verb is transitive, the causative is ditransitive:
to eat (sthg.) → to make (sbdy.) eat (sthg.), to feed (sthg.) to (sbdy.).
For the purpose of syntax, a derivation that turns an adjective or noun into a "verb of becoming" works the same as a causative construction for intransitive verbs. For example, in English the derivational suffixes -(i)fy can be thought of as a causative:
simple → simplify = "to make simple", "to cause (sthg.) to become simple"
object → objectify = "to make into an object", "to cause (sthg.) to become an object" (figuratively, that is)
Not too long a bibliography in the wiki entry for causatives. Just two:
ReplyDeleteShibatani, M. (ed.) (2001)
The grammar of causation and interpersonal manipulation.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
and
Song, J.J. (1996).
Causatives and causation:
A universal-typological perspective.
London and New York: Addison Wesley Longman.
ONE external link for 'causative' in wiki: to wit:
ReplyDelete"A causative is a grammatical or lexical indication of the causal role of a referent in relation to an event or state expressed by a verb. A causative may be indicated by a
verbal affix
component of meaning in the verb, or
special construction.
Examples (English)
Herod had John killed.
The sun solidified the mixture.
Sources
Crystal 1985 44–45
Elson and Pickett 1988 31
Faust 1973 70"
--- add H. P. Grice, "Actions and events" section: Variable polyadicity -- in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. "The implicature guy".