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"The man paints the wall red".

The verb to paint can take three arguments, the object, the subject and the colour of the paint. What kind of verb is this?

"The man colours the paper blue".

I think it's because this stands in for the (infinite) set of verbs "colours-blue" "colours-red" "colours-green" etc. e.g. "The man colours-red the paper". As colours exist in more than one axis.

Whereas for things like size we have verbs like "enlarges the balloon" instead of "sizes the balloon large".

Also it could exist for emotions.

"The clown makes the children happy".

"Makes" can stand in for a lot.

Are there any other verbs like this?

zooby
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  • Hammer, send, cook, give, tickle, slap. – user6726 Jun 10 '19 at 00:02
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    Interestingly, there are also quadrivalent verbs, as in "I bet you ten pounds that it rains" or "I'll trade you this bicycle for your binoculars". – BillJ Jun 10 '19 at 06:30
  • Though that's semantics more than syntax. The Commercial Transaction Frame isn't restricted to syntactic arguments. – jlawler Jun 10 '19 at 14:25
  • @user6726. Nope these only take 2 arguments. "The man hammers the nail". "The man send the letter". "The man cooks the pie". – zooby Jun 10 '19 at 19:51
  • @BillJ Intersting.... Although these have an added word "that" or "for". – zooby Jun 10 '19 at 19:53
  • @zooby "That" and "for" are part of the complements which are "I", "you", "ten pounds" and "that it rains" in my first example, and "I", "you","this bicycle" and "for your binoculars" in the second. These are all complements, i.e. syntactic functions. – BillJ Jun 11 '19 at 05:45
  • Also, @user 6726 is right that, for example, "give" can be trivalent, as in "She gave him some food", which has three complements: "She", "him" and "some food". Note that in accordance with some modern grammar, the subject is treated as a complement. – BillJ Jun 11 '19 at 06:24

1 Answers1

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Syntactically, verbs with two objects are ditransitive, which is just a fancy word for "takes three arguments". In English, one of these arguments goes before the verb and takes the subjective case, while the other two go after the verb and take the objective case.

Semantically, the third argument here is the manner of the action: it's semantically similar to "the man paints the wall vigorously", but syntactically different (compare "the man vigorously paints the wall" against *"the man blue paints the wall").

Many verbs that indicate an imposed state, without inherently indicating what that state is, can mark a manner in this way: "make" is a good generic one, as you noted, but also "turn", "set", "call", and so on.

Yellow Sky
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Draconis
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  • Yes, "The father names the girl Emma" is a good one. "The fire turns the wood black". "The cook turns the oven up". – zooby Jun 10 '19 at 19:55
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    I wonder if some languages "The man blue-paints the wall" is a common way of expressing things. – zooby Jun 10 '19 at 20:02
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    @zooby Yes! This is called "noun incorporation". See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_(linguistics) – Mark Beadles Jun 11 '19 at 23:27