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Rigidity of Word Order in English | ||
Tags: Syntax | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5613 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 9 of 15 30 June 2013 at 1:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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In Italian, when using indirect speech in the past, you have to use the past conditional:
Mi ha detto che avrebbe mangiato. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5370 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English | Message 10 of 15 30 June 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5613 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 11 of 15 30 June 2013 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5087 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 12 of 15 15 August 2013 at 4:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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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.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4449 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 13 of 15 15 August 2013 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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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 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5979 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 14 of 15 16 August 2013 at 3:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4532 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French | Message 15 of 15 16 August 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged | |||||
"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 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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