Delocutives

[Dominique.Thillaud]

At 2:46 +0100 13/12/97, Jacob Baltuch wrote:
>Mikael Aktor wrote:
>
>>My point, however, is that there is no functional difference between "to call
>>someone 'honey'" and "to honey someone". There may be good reasons to
>>have a linguistic technical term such as "delocutive" for the latter kind
>>of verb, but this does not make it a speech act of its own.
>
>Are you talking about the difference between "dire 'salut'" and "saluer",
>"say 'hail' to someone" and "hail someone" (="greet someone"), "say 'ok'
>to a proposal" and "ok a proposal" (="approve a proposal")?

        Yes, there are good reasons to have a linguistic technical term
such as "delocutive". But not only for pragmatical purpose and
English/American, poor in derivations and compounds (but 'yes-man'!), don't
show well this reasons.
        That's to explain some irregularities in the words' formation as
Latin 'salvere', French 'saluer' against Latin 'salvare', French 'sauver'.
And, from this point of view, we can reintroduce words such ahaMvAdin,
showing an unusual aham- against the usual mad- for 'aham' compounds.
        Even if a dubious vocative tAra was a wrong track to explain
tArakAmaya, some other words could be derived from vocatives of imperatives
(remember recent posts about bodhi). Were such formations aborded by pANini
?
        Regards,
Dominique

PS: about 'yes-man', you can compare the funny French equivalent
'beni-oui-oui', an Arabo-French chimera 'son of oui!oui!' (issued from the
Maghreb colonization by the France, but today completely naturalized, the
'beni' beeing understand 'blessed', 'simpleton').

Dominique THILLAUD
Universite' de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France