Re: [lojban] Re: Questions about Lojban

[And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote:

On Thursday, January 29, 2015 10:25:41 And Rosta wrote:
> No. The ambiguity is syntactic. -Ing has no polysemy; it is merely the
> default inflectional form of the verb.

"-ing" is polysemous, though I don't think it's relevant to this sentence.

 

I agree it's not relevant.

 

But responding on the not relevant point:

 

It's both the present active participle, previously "-ind", cognate to German
"-end", French "-ant" and Greek "-ων"; and the verbal noun, cognate to German
"-ung". "I stopped flying" can be parsed with both meanings of "-ing", which
doesn't change the meaning of the sentence much.

 

Diachronic merger of formerly discrete forms doesn't entail synchronic polysemy. Even if there is a syntactic difference between participle and verbal noun (which I dispute, but am in a minority on), that doesn't entail polysemy, and polysemy isn't evident; but I will concede that to most observers the participle in progressive constructions does appear to have distinctive meaning (tho again I think that's a misanalysis, but am in a tiny minority on). (Also, to be over-pedantic, ascribing polysemy to the affix itself is probably an unnecessarily strong commitment to a particular set of assumptions about morphology.)

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