Vladimir_M comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (823)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 09:34:46AM 3 points [-]

That is, I can understand objecting to "If my neighbor visits I'll give them a cookie" because it violates the English grammatical convention that the subject and object must match in quantity

Presumably you mean pronoun and antecedent. Clearly, subject and object need not agree in number (what you call "quantity"); such a requirement would in fact be logically impossible.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 13 March 2011 02:21:15PM 0 points [-]

Yup, you're right. I have absolutely no idea what my brain thought it was doing there. <hides face in shame>

Entirely incidentally: requiring that the subject and object match in number would admittedly be a strange sort of grammatical requirement to have, as it would preclude expressing all manner of useful thoughts (e.g., "Give me two slices of pizza"), and I'd be incredulous if an actual language claimed to have such a requirement, but I'm not sure it's logically impossible.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 13 March 2011 07:06:03PM *  0 points [-]

You're right, of course. In fact, one could conceive of a language where the grammatical number of the object would have to agree with the subject, and it would therefore not give any information about the actual number of things denoted by the object, which would have to be stated explicitly if it's necessary to avoid ambiguity, like in languages that lack grammatical number altogether. For all I know, there might even be an actual human language somewhere that features something like this.