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In morphology, periphrasis is when you use a phrase rather than a single verb form. for example, in Latin the present indicative active and passive forms of a verb are a single verb form: amo 'I love' and [i]amor 'I am loved'. In the English glosses to those two forms, the second one, the passive, is a periphrastic construction.
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@ tsu & Bran: I concur; use them both. What works for haiku (or a limerick) does not work at a retirement luncheon. There are a goodly handful of esoteric names in rhetoric for devices that use repetition of one form or another, and repetition is periphrasis, so the pedigree is there.
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"I love" and "I am loved" do not say the same thing, do they? The comparable passive voice for "I love [her]" would be "She is loved [by me]," not "I am loved [by her]."
"I don't know which is worse: ignorance or apathy. And, frankly, I don't care." - Anonymous
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"I love" and "I am loved" do not say the same thing, do they? The comparable passive voice for "I love [her]" would be "She is loved [by me]," not "I am loved [by her]."
No, they don't and I did not mean to imply that they do. I was just trying to illustrate that some constructions are periphrastic in that they have more than one word to convey a grammatical category. So, in English the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, "I am loved", but in Latin the passive is usually a single word, amor.
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it depends on your definition of 'case'. Equating 'case' with the grammatical markers used to indicate case makes for some strange combinations.
Most linguists these days go for a bit of both: overt grammatical markings (the surface morphology of case) and the function (the syntax of words and the function of case.
In Latin, for example, in first declension genitive and dative singular are the same case and in second declension dative and ablative singular are the same case.
That's not how the Romans or today's grammarians would have analysed it. They distinguished case from case-endings (or other kinds of overt markers). Even the Indian grammarians of Sanskrit, who came from an entirely different tradition, separated case-endings from case. They also divided the cases into a myriad of functions, e.g., the genitive of possession and the partitive genitive. While the names given to cases are essentially arbitrary--in fact, the Sanskrit grammarians just numbered their cases, first through seventh--they are convenient tags to discuss the various phenomena of case. I was going for a sort of reductio ad absurdum with my comment on the first declension genitive and dative singular being the same case. If we look at it entirely disconnected from any inflectional morphemes then we would have, who knows, some 25 or 30 cases including at least two for subjects of sentences. This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.' Pullum's argument is here. Click on the little SHOW.
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I was going for a sort of reductio ad absurdum with my comment on the first declension genitive and dative singular being the same case. If we look at it entirely disconnected from any inflectional morphemes then we would have, who knows, some 25 or 30 cases including at least two for subjects of sentences.
I see. Not sure I quite understand. Do you mean if you ignore the overt markings you can analyse sentences in such a way that in Latin or English there are something like 20 or 30 cases? There's probably way more than that. I once listened to a nervous little East german professor read stiffly from his poorly translated paper why there were hundreds of different kinds of and, logically speaking, not grammatically. I think the Roman, Greek, and Indian grammarians did a fine job of abstracted the overt morphological markers from the grammatical functions when it came to case. If you look at Latin's five declensions, you get a good feel for there being five cases, and maybe an extra one thrown in for the 2nd declension vocative. That some cases in certain declensions have identical endings did not seem to confuse them very much, but who knows, maybe you're on to something. You should write it up and send it to Language or Linguistic Inquiry.
This is all in aid of my internal rantings against the Huddleston/Pullum categorization of bush as a preposition in the sentence 'On hatching, the chicks scramble to the surface and head bush on their own.'
I don't know. I've always felt that the fiddly bits of parts of speech that are left over in the linguistic rag bag after all the heavy lifting and categorization are done, make for interesting perusal. There is something about prepositions, verbal particles, and adverbs, that is all messy and overlappish. Pullum's discovery is at least interesting, but then again if it rubs you the wrong way, rant on, dude! You'll be in good company. every linguistic conference I've ever gone to is full of ranting, peevish linguists disagreeing with each other and sometimes with earlier versions of themselves.
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I guess if you count all the different ablatives as one case I suppose you could limit it to 5 or 6. I just picked 25 or 30 because I don't know of any language that recognizes more than that in the formal grammar. Fifty might work, too. I haven't given the actual number that much thought.
And I don't think that bush in the Pullum sentence is an adverb. It's what it has always been; a noun. It's the word that names the place the chicks go to and it's in whatever case it is that defines things gone to.
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It's what it has always been; a noun. It's the word that names the place the chicks go to and it's in whatever case it is that defines things gone to.
Yeah but, you cannot replace it with another noun AFAIK. You can replace it with an adverb or a preposition or two.
I just see words changing parts-of-speech-hood at the drop of a clitic. Some languages force you to use derivational morphology is all, but some like Mandarin Chinese and to a slightly lesser extent English let you get away with morpher.
But it's not worth getting hot and bothered about, so I'll let it slide. Heading on out of here or skywards, p'raps.
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in English the passive voice is a periphrastic construction, "I am loved", but in Latin the passive is usually a single word, amor. Got it. Thanks, too, as this is all new to me. This has been a very informative thread so far - more in line with what I expected when I signed up.
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"Yeah but, you cannot replace it with another noun AFAIK. You can replace it with an adverb or a preposition or two"
What about a gerund like "hunting?" Would "hunting," if used in place of "bush" in that sentence, even be a gerund?
"I don't know which is worse: ignorance or apathy. And, frankly, I don't care." - Anonymous
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