On 30 Apr 2015, at 2:29 pm, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was told at school that 'a sentence which does not contain a verb is not a
>> sentence' which I gather was meant to imply 'you have not managed to say
>> anything if you don't use a verb' which is bollocks, of course.
> "This sentence no verb."
>
> Without a verb you have a hard time indicating how the object(s) in the
> sentence relate to each other. (Apart from interjective sentences like
> "Hello!", at least.)
The still night.
The watery abyss.
The pale moonlight.
The Madness of King George.
So, without a verb you can still indicate and describe something as long as
there is no change taking place. Existence, in these instances, is not invoked
but assumed.
You can imply a verb's existence without actually using it:
Me hungry.
System shutdown in 60 seconds.
It was sci-fi man Robert Anton Wilson (friend of Bob Heinlein) who tried to get
rid of the "is" in his writing and public speaking. Invoking QM, he argued you
cannot know what anything is anyway, so give up the pretense and bite the
bullet. You have to lose the "is" in your communicating. You may have heard of
"E-Prime" or English without the verb "to be." Worth the Wiki article if not.
Bob tried valiantly to use E-Prime in his later philosophical books.
>
> But generally it's hard to construct meaningful sentences without verbs.
That's right. Just ask old Bob.
> This doesn't mean they all have to contain references to time, of course.
> "Roses are red" or "two plus two equals four" can be either statements that
> are currently true - hence in the present tense - or timeless statements of
> fact. (Bruce and I are agreed that the latter statement is in the latter
> category.)
>
Yes. How about "Two plus two IS four." Is that a meaningful clone? Most say
this because "equals" is maths nerd-speak. Is it even grammatically correct?
Should we not say "two plus two are four". By now it sounds like double-dutch.
If something "equals" something else via addition/multiplication, have we not
emulated or simulated something (in the mathematical sense?)
K
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