On 2009-10-12, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I fully understand where you're coming from, English is my
> native tongue too, and I deal with positionality (is that a
> word?) fluently. But I also see it's flaws, some of them are
> quite gross. You have no way to denote emphasis other than by
> saying so or using modified font glyphs; in a compound
> sentence using an unqualified pronoun is usually ambiguous.
> Example:
>
> Joe went to school with Bill and he passed his classes. Joe
> went to school with Bill, and he passed his classes.
>
> Who does "he" refer to in both? I'll bet there's some complex
> rule that does define the convention, and I'll also bet very
> few people know what it is.
I'm not sure I see how having nominative/subjective cases for
nouns solves the problem in that case. I guess it would allow
for a rule that the pronoun would always refer to the closest
preceding referrent.
In English, the "solution" for the situation is to say either
Joe went to school with Bill and passed his classes.
or
Joe went to school with Bill who passed his classes.
The former uses "and" without a second subject to indicate the
parallel structure where a single subject performed two actions
(both with an object):
/ verb object
Subject <
\ verb object
The latter solution uses a single subject-verb-object construct
where the object includes a clause "who passed his classes" to
modify that object. The tricky bit in that is that even though
it's part of the main sentence's object, "who" is the subject
of the modifying clause, so it's the subjective case.
At least that's what I think Mrs. Russell from McDowell high
school would have said 30 years ago...
>> I give up, why doesn't "the ball the boy kicked" work?
>
> If I tell you "ball" is the objective case and "the boy" is
> the subjective case, can you see where I'm going? It's still
> the boy that kicked the ball but the position denotes
> emphasis, not case.
Ah, yes I see. So you can then use position to imply whether
the statement is attempting to answer the question "what was
kicked?" or "who kicked the ball?"
--
Grant
