Re: Verbs and children

"Oliver" == Oliver Cromm <lispamateur@xxxxxxxx> writes:

>>> Argghh... I like math better than poetry. I think you'll get
>>> into circular loop if I started to ask "what is a word class?"
>> It's a thing English shares with fellow Indo-European
>> languages, but not all languages.

Oliver> Really? In some languages, every word behaves the same,
Oliver> grammatically?

Sort of. In my mother tongue, "nouns" are often usable as "verbs",
and they are also usable as "adjectives", WITHOUT any change in form.
You can only classify these words according to their meanings of their
sentences, using the IE classifications of "nouns", "verbs",
"adjectives", etc. When the word is isolated from any sentences, you
can't say what its classification is.

In addition to that, what you would tend to classify as "verbs" in my
mother tongue do not have a sharp distinction between what you would
classify as "adjectives" -- without any change in form, and these
words can often be used as "nouns" without any change in form.


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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