You have shifted your ground somewhat in speaking of mistakes made by L2 learners in adulthood. Hardly seems to merit the word discovery. L1 intrusion is a common experience of anyone who has learnt a foreign language.

sudanglo:For those who think that human speak languages through an evolved faculty, the word faculty does not just mean 'an ability to'. It refers to a specialized feature in the brain.

No, that's a category mistake. Faculties are just abilities. You can't find faculties in brains. You may find structures that support faculties--indeed, you must find them, unless you believe that faculties are supported by an immaterial soul, as Descartes did.

So, if faculties are supported by the brain, rather than an immaterial soul, then there are structures there that support them. And if the brain has the structures that it has because of its evolutionary history, then that would include the structures that support language ability.

Certainly, one may dispute that faculties are supported by structures in the brain or that the brain has the structures it has because of its evolutionary past. These points are not, in fact, disputed by scientists.

sudanglo:You have shifted your ground somewhat in speaking of mistakes made by L2 learners in adulthood. Hardly seems to merit the word discovery. L1 intrusion is a common experience of anyone who has learnt a foreign language.

I'm merely adding to the evidence.

The word "discovery" is not reserved for the findings that impress sudanglo. That adult L2 learners make mistakes different in kind from L1 learners or young L2 learners is a genuine scientific discovery. That fact, in conjunction with the rare but documented selective aphasias, is evidence that the brain structures that support adult L2 acquisition are different from those that support language acquisition in children.

Notice I used the word "evidence", not "proof". Until we understand precisely how the brain structures do what they do, we can't draw conclusions with certainty. To arrive at such an understanding, however, the part played by linguists is every bit as important as what the neuroscientists are doing.

T0dd:That adult L2 learners make mistakes different in kind from L1 learners or young L2 learners is a genuine scientific discovery..

And a very interesting one. It reminds me of a book I read by Edward de Bono many years ago, The Mechanism of Mind. He suggested an experiment with a bowl of jelly ( = "jello" in American English) and some hot water. Pour some on, pour it off, then repeat. the channels that the hot water initially makes are liable to deepen with each pouring and become the most "influential". This may illustrate that early training creates neural structures that endure the deepest and longest, so that it would be very difficult for L2 learning to sink in as well as L1 (but I prefer to be optimistic for determined learners. ).

Veering back to the Gledhill monograph itself, I've been reading it sporadically, in spare moments. As sudanglo says, there's not a lot that would be news to people who know Esperanto reasonably well, but it presents a pretty careful and objective picture for the benefit of those who don't.

There are, in fact, some points that I didn't know, or hadn't considered before. One of them is the behavior of so-called "predicative verbs", i.e., verbs formed from adjectives by adding just the verb ending, without -IG- or -IĜ-. He points out that, in the corpus that he's using for his study, such verbs are fairly frequent in absolute number, but tend to be drawn from a very limited set of adjectives. These include:

abundas, certas, fidelas, fieras, gravas, kapablas, necesas, pretas, and sufiĉas. I think we could add quite a few more.

He points out that these are far more common than predicative verbs from other equally common adjectives, such as bela, granda, bona, stulta, blua ktp. He comments, "This suggests that the verbal use of an adjective root is phraseological: i.e., limited to a consistent set of lexical items."

In calling these cases "phraseological" he's suggesting that they're not used in a particularly generative way. That is, they are not perceived by speakers as words generated by the application of a rule, but just as verbs in their own right. It's striking that, even among the 100 or so most commonly used adjectives in Esperanto, some are routinely used as verbs while others are rarely used in this way. A more detailed study would be needed to determine whether there's an underlying semantic structure that explains the non-random distribution.

One of the nice things about an observational work of this sort is that it suggests interesting possibilities for focused research projects.

In agreeing with Gledhill about gravas, pretas etc you are happy to see these as verbs in their own right (not treated as deconstructable into root + '-i').

So what about matenmanĝi? Aren't those who favour intransitive use seeing this (applying the Gledhill notion) as more than maten+manĝ+i, but rather a verbal notion from matenmanĝo.

Actually lots of verbs in Esperanto (from familiarity) are perceived as lexical items rather than generated combinations, you could argue. Telefoni, marteli and so on.

And just as certain adjectival roots more commonly give rise to verbal forms, so certain substantive roots are more or less common in verbal form.

Uncommon, trajni, busi - common, bicikli, telefoni.

If people rarely say 'pontas', aŭ 'soŝeas', where does that get us?

Isn't this just a reflection of the way the world is, and what we like to talk about.

Not exactly profound, is it?

Those who believe in human brains having developed a language faculty (from Darwinian evolution) have concrete predictions to make which are different from these who would deny the existence of such a specialization.

The idea isn't vacuous.

They would for example predict that there are features of language which are to be found in all languages.

No such predictions would be made in the case of games or legal systems. We don't imagine a sepcialization that appears in homo sapiens for such cultural products.

All this is highly relevant to Esperanto and whether certain designs of constructed languages are viable as languages. Only those congruent with this biological specialization could become languages.

When it comes to a game or sport on the other hand, you could invent any rules you like, provided they don't go beyond our physical abilities.

sudanglo:In agreeing with Gledhill about gravas, pretas etc you are happy to see these as verbs in their own right (not treated as deconstructable into root + '-i').

Sigh. Why can't you actually bother to read what I said? I said nothing about deconstruction or decomposition. I merely mentioned Gledhill's point that certain adjectives are favored for use as verbs, so they are common enough that they are used as verbs, without any sense of being generated.

So what about matenmanĝi? Aren't those who favour intransitive use seeing this (applying the Gledhill notion) as more than maten+manĝ+i, but rather a verbal notion from matenmanĝo.

I don't want to speak for them, since I've yet to see an argument for their position that makes any sense. And I refuse to infect yet another thread with that topic.

Actually lots of verbs in Esperanto (from familiarity) are perceived as lexical items rather than generated combinations, you could argue. Telefoni, marteli and so on.

Yes, absolutely. Gledhill wasn't making the point that the adjective case was unique.

And just as certain adjectival roots more commonly give rise to verbal forms, so certain substantive roots are more or less common in verbal form.

Again, not in dispute.

Isn't this just a reflection of the way the world is, and what we like to talk about.

Not exactly profound, is it?

Did I say it was profound? No. So why do you say that?

I said only two things. One was that I was previously unaware of the extent to which predicative verb usage was centered around a relatively small number of adjectives, while other commonly used adjectives are seldom used that way.

Profound? No. But I learned something, and thought it was interesting.

The other thing I said was that this observation of Gledhill's suggests an avenue of future research: To see if there is any underlying semantic reason why these verbs, and not others, are favored. That's all.

sudanglo:Those who believe in human brains having developed a language faculty (from Darwinian evolution) have concrete predictions to make which are different from these who would deny the existence of such a specialization.

The idea isn't vacuous.

They would for example predict that there are features of language which are to be found in all languages.

How does that follow? Brains are what they are, and language is what it is. How brains got to be the way they are is an interesting question, but if you reject evolution, it doesn't change the fact that human brains, right now, are equipped to acquire language.

If the set of learnable languages is constrained by the hardware of the brain, this would only apply to L1s learned in childhood, since that appears to be when the L1 acquisition hardware is active.

All of this is unaffected by the question of whether the hardware of the brain got this way by means of Darwinian evolution or in some other way.

All this is highly relevant to Esperanto and whether certain designs of constructed languages are viable as languages. Only those congruent with this biological specialization could become languages.

Again, it's mainly relevant to L1s learned in childhood. Since Esperanto has been learned as an L1 in childhood, there's really not that much left to say. Esperanto doesn't violate any fundamental laws of learnable languages--not even ones that we don't know about yet. If it did, it wouldn't be learnable as an L1.

For the record, the number of known absolute linguistic universals is small. Furthermore, it's not known whether the known universals are necessary or contingent. Of course, if it weren't for the scientific investigations of linguists we wouldn't know of the existence of absolute linguistic universals at all...

Last night, I read another section of the Gledhill monograph. Again, I learned something interesting. In this case, it's probably something that everybody else knows, but I managed to miss.

It has to do with the "ata/ita" business. I've certainly read enough explanations of their use, over the years, and I've read the debates about their use in compound tenses. I long ago settled on the "aspect" interpretation favored by David Jordan, especially since he drilled it into us at NASK. But I confess to feeling hesitant sometimes, when using these as simple passive participial adjectives.

Gledhill points out that in actual use, they tend to sort according to the type of verb they are used with. The terms he uses are "verbs of result" versus "verbs of duration"; I'd use different terms. My tendency is to borrow some language from philosophy and think of "occurrent" versus "dispositional" verbs, but the end result is the same.

For example, we might say that an Esperanto word is multe uzata whereas we'd say that a battery is eluzita, both in the present tense. We say that people and places are konata but I don't think I've ever heard konita.

The reason, of course, has to do with the meanings of the verbs. Gledhill's two categories simply make this more transparent, to me anyway. So called "verbs of duration", or what I'd call "dispositional" verbs, refer to open-ended activities, with no specified termination. "Verbs of result", or what I'd call "occurrent" verbs, refer to time-bound episodes, with a fairly clear beginning and end. With the dispositional verbs, -ata is most often the passive ending that you want, because of its "in progress" aspect. What was illuminating to me was the point that it's in the nature of the verbs themselves to "fit" one passive participle or the other. Thus, to know which one to use, one should look at what kind of a verb it actually is, rather than hyperfocusing on the ending, which is what I tended to do.

Of course, there are always cases where a departure from the norm is useful to make a point. Calling a person konita would imply that he is a has-been, someone who used to be known, but no longer is.

As I say, I think all this is old news to everyone else, but it's the first time I ever considered that the type of verb would help to decide which passive participle to use.