Re: [Lingo] Correct particle to use

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 20/06/07, David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com> wrote:

> I'd be curious to know whether this acceptability extends even to older
> people.

As would I. Goddamn it, I feel like whipping up a survey and asking a
few of my co-workers to hand it out to their parents. That can't be
healthy... ;)

> It seems entirely plausible that this could be just another
> aspect of the possible change affecting syntactic treatment of patients

Quite possibly.

> V-potentials (to use your notation)

Pretty sweet notation, right? :)

It is meant to be the mathematical subscript notation, as used heavily
in physics equations, e.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twins_paradox#What_it_looks_like:_the_relativistic_Doppler_shift

> Nothing personal to your wife, of course, but I wouldn't bother with
> stuff she learned in school. I have acquired a kind of knee-jerk
> skepticism about the things many 日本人 linguists say about their
> own language.

I share your skepticism, but luckily my wife's degree is from The Ohio
State University:

http://deall.osu.edu/programs/graduate/jaLxProg.cfm

One of the main professors is American, and the other two are Japanese
but have all of their  degrees from US universities.

So hopefully she's gotten less of the 日本人[論] stuff.

> I'm not an anti-Chomskyan by any means, but I'm not a card-carrier
> either.

I worship Chompsky as a god, but that is because of the extreme
usefullness of his stuff to artificial languages. :)

> I'm far more interested in your wife's native-speaking intuitions, all
> the more valuable since she's a trained linguist :-)

Hmm... I'm afraid her native-speaking intuitions only give us insight
into the Slavic family of langauges--specifically Bulgarian. ;)

> Absolutes'll get you into trouble :-)  How about a case like one
> in which you might say この本を読めるよ as a way of pointing out
> that you're capable of reading Japanese, rather than that you're capable
> of reading a particular book?

Nah, in that case I would say 「日本語が読める」. Of course, I am not a native
speaker, so it really doesn't matter. ;)

> > So I'll continue to consider を a grammatical error in this case,
> > because that allows me to sleep at night. ;)
>
> No doubt you're in the good company of thousands of 国語 teachers

国語 teachers are my heros. For example, I *love* this kind of thing:

http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuation/dp/1592402038/
http://www.amazon.com/Woe-Grammarphobes-Better-English-Second/dp/1594480060/

Cheers,
Josh

PS: ***DISCLAIMER*** I work for Amazon and thus want you to buy our books! ;)