(no subject)

[go_gentle]

Dear flist: I haz a curiosity about languages, and I'm looking for data from folks who speak languages other than English. So, if you do, would you be willing to answer a couple of questions about whether two sentences are grammatical or not for me? (It's sort of a fussy point, so I suspect you probably need to be fairly fluent to have a grammaticality judgment.)




Sentence 1:

It seems to Mary that John is tired. (English)
Sembra a Maria che Gianni e stanco. (Italian)

Sentence 2:

John seems to Mary to be tired. (English)
Gianni sembra a Maria essere stanco. (Italian)

I don't need the translations into other languages - the Italian is provided because I had it to hand and it gives a sense of one way the translation might work. All I want to know is whether the translations exist would in a grammatical sort of way. (yes, I know sentence 2 is bad in Italian.)

[Poll #1377659]



I'll probably post a link back to this post on Monday for people who are away for the weekend, and if there's interest, I can write something up next week about what about the data I'm looking at and why it's interesting to me.

Comments

[mmeguilotn.livejournal.com]

My Hebrew is nowhere near good enough to be a useful data point, but I'm fairly certain that #2 doesn't work. I think #1 is closer but the conjunction would be implied rather than explicit, i.e. "It seems to Mary John is tired" or "To Mary it seems John is tired."

What about "John seems tired to Mary?" It's not a pretty sentence with a proper name like that, and I probably wouldn't use it in writing, but speaking colloquially I would always say "He seems tired to me." Although now it occurs to me that #1 has a slightly different connotation than #2 and the one I suggested do. Hmm.

[go-gentle.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thank you!