Sunday, February 7, 2010

Few more sentences to test Complex CL construction

  1. Two bottles of wine were thrown into the soup
  2. John drank up 4 bottles of wine
  3. Three big bowls of soup
  4. Three pound meat
  5. Roger ate four big bowls of rice
  6. I bought 4 card boxes of linguistics books into my office
For examples like 5, Hindi construction would be "Roger-ne chaar bare katori chaaval khaye" is grammatically correct and acceptable too. I guess I have rightly written the sentence like in TV cookery shows I have heard "chaar bare chammach haldhi powder" sort of things. In Assamese, this kind of construction is odd:

Roger-e          daangor     saari    baati      bhaat    khaale
Roger-Nom   big              4           bowl       rice       ate

The following is the right one with the insertion of Instrumental case marker and this is the strict order, no DP internal movement, rather scrambling of constituents (meaning Roger need not eat from 4 different bowls, it can be one big bowl, 4 times):
Roger-e          daangor    baati-re        saari    baati     bhaat   khaale
Roger-Nom   big              bowl-Instr   4          bowl      rice      ate

Its like, if we have to say in Hindi: "bare katori-se chaar katori chaaval"... can we say that?
Is similar construction possible in Hindi (without using 'baar' as in 'chaar baar' )?

Again when we say -- "two sacks of rice" either way its possible:
"do bori chaaval" or "chaaval ke do bori". But there is a difference in interpretation. The first one denotes some amount of rice whereas in the second one it refers to two sacks meant for filling with rice, not necessarily amount of rice. However, English translation and interpretation is same (amount of rice). Is it making sense?

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