Re: thai grammar
Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 2:50 am
pensive wrote:Tgeezer wrote:Can you show me an example of a stative predicate in English so I can see what it is, purely for curiosities sake of course.
The sea is green.
The problem with this example is that it is very hard to find a clear example of an intransitive stative verb in English. The closest I can come is the verb 'to smell' simply meaning 'to smell bad', but even that is subject to the caveat that smells wax and wane. A test for a stative verb is that it does not readily adopt the continuous verb form (the form in '-ing'). Stative verbs with complements or objects are common - 'to own' and 'to be' are good examples.
Stative verbs contrasting with adjectives do occur in other languages - Latin has stative verbs such as caleo 'to be hot' and valeo 'to be strong'. These had competing adjectives calidus 'hot' and validus 'strong'.
Adjectives tend to either behave like verbs or to behave like nouns. In the Indo-European scheme, adjectives were very like nouns (some deny that nouns and adjectives were distinct parts of speech in Latin), though the similarities are weaker in English. In Thai, either adjectives are very like verbs, or what we translate as adjectives are verbs and the true adjectives are a relatively small class.