the verb

[Gerald van Koeverden]

gladney frank y wrote:

> But how about _Ice is something I prefer not to have in my water_? Would
> you consider the middle eight or nine words in this sentence the verb?

Yes and no.

NO, if I take the sentence itself as an object to be dissected in and of
itself as an entity separate from its meaning. I was flabbergasted and
most appreciative of the complexity of the answers several people sent
posted.  I thought it was a simple question which would have simple answer.
Looks
like we both get to keep our 20; we were both wrong in this sense.

YES, if I want to understand the meaning of the sentence and separate it
out into the three components- from which it was derived in someone's
head-the universal sense of subject, verb and object. At this point I'm not
interested in the hard-core 'grammatical' interpretation of those three terms,
except as
how they help me get to the meaning.  In this case the speaker is describing
the relationship of ice and water in his preferences for how he likes his
water: he wants them keep separately. I'm interested in how the speaker or
listener relates to a sentence and makes meaning of it.  And so far, I've
discovered this particular relationship in all sentences I've explored.  Does
this
kind of approach ring any good bells???  Or does all this that sound like
"Why does ice dissolve in water?"


[ I'm obviously not a 'linguist'.  I'm a philospher, doing a little
cross-disciplinary exploring, though some of you
might feel that I'm trespassing....What's a philospher to do?  He is a
very nosey person, sticking his nose into everybody else's business....trying
to make connections where there aren't any...yet.  But our skins are as
thick as a rhinoceros.  It comes with the job.  And we are very polite
too, though somewhat persistent.]

gerald van koeverden