BPFK Section: Erasures
On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 10:10:52PM -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 January 2005 21:37, Rob Speer wrote:
> > I think the complaint is that it's a very unnatural and counterintuitive
> > rule. It's not just newbies who shouldn't have to know what selma'o are;
> > eventually, no user of the language should have to know what selma'o are.
> > They're a tool for talking about the language, not part of the language.
>
> Lots of English speakers don't know what an animate noun is, but if you say
> "The cow was found by a stream by a farmer", they know who found the cow.
That's because they can use some relatively straightforward semantics to get
the most likely interpretation of the sentence. And English never claims to be
unambiguous, so there's no problem if they don't know the "rule" about animate
nouns precisely enough.
How do you define "the same selma'o" without requiring memorization of a whole
bunch of lists of cmavo? It's not "can be interchanged grammatically in any
context", because we know there are distinct selma'o that are grammatically
equivalent.
--
Rob Speer