[Lexicog] accusatory observation?

[John Roberts]

My wife says that in Cantonese you would say "the pencil dropped".

I don't have any Amele speakers handy to check with but I think you would
use an impersonal experiential verb to say this which would be equivalent to
"the pencil dropped" or "the pencil was dropped by you".

I notice that the Collins COBUILD gives two senses for "drop" for a vt under
superordinate "release": the first is "let fall by mistake" and the second
is "let go of deliberately". But both these senses are expressed in the same
way lexico-syntactically, i.e. with an actor and undergoer argument. Which
means when I say "You dropped your pen" I could mean either you did it
deliberately or accidentally. I think I could also use this to express
another sense. If the teacher was walking across the classroom and the pen
fell from his pocket, say, and he didn't notice, I would say, "You dropped
your pen" meaning 'the pen fell from you'. In the first context if I said
"the pen dropped" it wouldn't be polite; it would be very odd, like I was
trying to say the dropping of the pen had nothing to do with the person
holding it - or maybe I am talking about another pen ...


John Roberts




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