Thanks Raul (comments embedded) On 2010-11-22, at 5:45 PM, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 8:26 PM, bob therriault <[email protected]> wrote: >> That the same adverb has three different actions depending >> on the part of speech it modifies seems like a natural language >> than a computer language (but that might be just my take). In any >> case, it does introduce an extra level of variation beyond the >> dyadic/monadic question, so it did seem that the function of >> having nouns as arguments made adverbs more complex i.e. tricky. > > I do not really understand what you mean when you say "three > different actions depending on the part of speech it modifies". > You'r right, we're really talking about two parts of speech (nouns and verbs), the third part of speech would be modifying other adverbs and this is really a case of modifying a verb (which is in this case an adverb-verb combination). > If you want to deal with their full generality: > > Adverbs can modify nouns or verbs. (That seems like two > parts of speech.) > Yep (see above) > Depending on their definition (and their argument, if that > matters for their definition), they can produce a noun, a > verb, an adverb or a conjunction. > > If you do not want to deal with their full generality, treating > the typical case where they modify a verb and produce > a new, derived verb, would seem to be worth highlighting. > I am starting to think of adverbs as a kind of preprocessor for a verb by changing the way arguments are parsed/adjusted prior to use. This may be a flawed view :) > Of course, the verb itself can be used in a monadic verb > context or a dyadic verb context. But that context is largely > independent of the adverb. Hmmm. I think by this you mean the monadic or dyadic versions of the verb-adverb complex (which is a verb itself). In that case, whether the verb-adverb is monadic or dyadic is certainly independent of the adverb and only depends on the number of arguments. If you are referring only to the verb being modified by the adverb, in the case of ~ and / the verb is always acting with two arguments. There may be cases where the modified verb does change from monadic to dyadic depending on the number of arguments of the verb-adverb complex, but as I am still muddling through the language I haven't seen that behaviour yet. > > -- > Raul Cheers, bob > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
