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Rigidity of Word Order in English

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stelingo
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 Message 9 of 15
30 June 2013 at 1:18am | IP Logged 
In Italian, when using indirect speech in the past, you have to use the past conditional:

Mi ha detto che avrebbe mangiato.
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simonov
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 Message 10 of 15
30 June 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged 
stelingo wrote:
In Italian, when using indirect speech in the past, you have to use the past conditional:
Mi ha detto che avrebbe mangiato.

Are you sure? I might be wrong, but I thought you'd use indicative tenses for expressing actual FACTS:
   'He told me he had eaten' implies that he 'had actually eaten'. So "... que aveva mangiato"
'... que avrebbe mangiato' sounds more like English "he might/would [already] have eaten". Supposition rather than actual fact.
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stelingo
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 Message 11 of 15
30 June 2013 at 11:59pm | IP Logged 
simonov wrote:
stelingo wrote:
In Italian, when using indirect speech in the past, you have to use the past conditional:
Mi ha detto che avrebbe mangiato.

Are you sure? I might be wrong, but I thought you'd use indicative tenses for expressing actual FACTS:
   'He told me he had eaten' implies that he 'had actually eaten'. So "... que aveva mangiato"
'... que avrebbe mangiato' sounds more like English "he might/would [already] have eaten". Supposition rather than actual fact.


Yes, you're right. In fact the past conditional is used in Italian to refer to a future in the past, where in English and in the other Romance languages we would use the simple conditional. This is something I've only recently learnt, and am still getting my head around it. Some examples from my grammar book:

Il controllore ci ha detto che il treno sarebbe arrivato in orario.
The ticket inspector told us that the train would arriveon time.

Speravo che sarebbero stati qui per l'ora di pranzo.
I was hoping they would be here by lunchtime.
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Aquila123
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 Message 12 of 15
15 August 2013 at 4:55am | IP Logged 
In English you can sey: To me he told that he had eaten. Different word order are usually not equivalent, though, but will depend on what you want to point out most explicitly.
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Medulin
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 Message 13 of 15
15 August 2013 at 10:22pm | IP Logged 
In Brazilian Portuguese, word order is pretty rigid too.
With transitive verbs, the only choice is: SVO

A gente conhece você. = We know you.

If you change você and a gente, the meaning is different:
Você conhece a gente. = You know us.

don't mix:
Quem você conhece? = Who(m) do you know?
Quem conhece você? = Who knows you?


Only with intransitive verbs, inversion is possible:
Chegou você. = Você chegou. = You've come / You came.


Edited by Medulin on 15 August 2013 at 10:30pm

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Haksaeng
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 Message 14 of 15
16 August 2013 at 3:10am | IP Logged 
Aquila123 wrote:
In English you can sey: To me he told that he had eaten. Different word order are usually not equivalent, though, but will depend on what you want to point out most explicitly.


That sounds extremely awkward. The meaning is obvious but I can't imagine anyone expressing it that way.

He told me that he had eaten.
He told me he had eaten.
He told me he already ate.
He said he'd eaten.
He told me he ate. (Theoretically this changes the sense of the sentence but in US English we don't distinguish these tenses in ordinary speech)
He'd eaten, he told me.
He told me he'd had something to eat already.
He had already eaten, he told me. (Looks a little backwards, but could sound perfectly natural in context)

etc. etc. I think there are a lot more variations.
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nonneb
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 Message 15 of 15
16 August 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged 
Aquila123 wrote:
In English you can sey: To me he told that he had eaten. Different word order are usually not equivalent, though, but will depend on what you want to point out most explicitly.


"To me he said that he had eaten" is ok, and I can imagine some contexts where native speakers would say that, but I'm pretty sure the sentence with told doesn't work. Something about the valency of tell and say or something, I never quite remember exactly how to explain it.

I tell him. = ok
I tell to him. = not ok
I say him. = not ok
I say to him. = ok


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