Constituent, adverbial, and the prepositional phrase

Consider the following sentence:

(1) He is at the station.

We could ask

(2) Where is he?

and we may also ask:

(3) He is at what?

or

(4) What is he at?

However (3) and (4) are marked in the linguistic sense. (2) seems the more natural question form. Consider (5):

(5) He is there.

We are no longer able to ask (3) or (4). This shows that at the station in (1) is equivalent to there in (5). It is a constituent, an adverbial to be exact, and in (1) a prepositional phrase more precisely.

Published by

6 responses to “Constituent, adverbial, and the prepositional phrase”

  1. “God” Is just one word to describe an aspect of what is occurring. A rose by any other name…is also thorny 🤘🏾

    So far as Witt, and others: I knew things already. Then I read some authors who knew those things also, but phrased it for thier moment.

    I agree with them because they seem to reflect things I already found out. Like it was me writing in a different style. But actually, one could say, they agree with me.

    I see this phenomenon as discussed by Kierkegaard in Philosophical Crumbs; specifically, the issue of the contemporary.

    The very short story of My experience with philosophy was that I could not believe that various authors were writing about what I already knew, and that some were writing from just before i was born to even 3500 years ago. I simply could not believe it, so I have doubted philosophy from day one. 😄 I can’t help it; but at the same time, there it is. It’s a phenomenon.

    It was just too incredible to believe, that I thought for a while that I might be insane. 👽. I think now. That it is just absurd.

    Like

  2. Undoubtedly early 20c was its own time. I never said they were right. It only goes to show that every moment is “right” then and wrong in the future as well as in the past.

    Do you disagree with the assessment or is it a specific point of mine or Wittgenstein’s?

    Language is far trickier than that, I feel. Many problems stem from language and what is taken as a given.

    “What use are you getting out of how you view philosophy ?”

    Philosophy gives me a way to understand the reality, including the reality of philosophy. This includes the sometimes seemingly separateness of reality and philosophy, as though such a thing is possible. Philosophy (as well as religion and science) gives me tools to understand the world. Philosophy, religion, and science are far from perfect. But neither is the world.

    And to posit that there is a perfect philosophy, religion or science is to believe in absolutes. This I feel is no better than God or the self.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Oh hey: I put THE FIRST PART of THE PHILOSOPHICAL HACK: the concluding unscientific post script to event, on Academia edu. If you feel like checking it out.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. 🤖 I disagree. 😝. Well, yes. But I’d say that the change that is humans changing shows that Witt was speaking of a moment, and that the polemic between facts and things reflects the ideology of his moment, as the evidence also shows many people agreed with his formulation. But that Witt was having trouble (I guess) with PI also shows that Pi was proving to him to not reflect what he was really coming upon: it appeared like language, but the appearance fails. Faith upholds the continuity where it fails, as we see after Witt. I’d say.

    Yes, the faith which accompanies language does show PI to have more real applications so far as philosophy dealing with its extension beyond itself. I’d agree with that.

    Similar to how we can see Freud, say, and then maybe Hillman 50 years later. Freud was not wrong, in this way, he was part of the logic of ideas of the time. Humans and the universe change.

    So I’d say. Facts are things. Witt by his evidence (not his logic necessarily, less by the content of his clauses) gives us how the formation of worlds through language is the idealism: he shows us that consciousness is able to “believe” in what language would have. And I would pose this against language as a reflection. Either “going out”. Or “coming in”. ‘Coming in’ I’d say is “both”. ‘Going out’ is thought centrality. Just as a way a framing things.

    Like me getting punched in the back of the head the other day: fact. The object of the fist, and the object of the head, and the object of the punch itself: facts, things we talk about.

    Any ways:

    I was going to ask you:

    What use are you getting out of how you view philosophy ?

    Since you said the equity of existing things you find not very useful.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Yes, I do. Tractatus got it wrong on the second proposition. Everything went downhill from there.

    PI is a much better, more real work. It has some great insights in there.

    Tracatus is an idealist work. PI is a materialist one.

    Like

  6. You must really like Wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations.

    I like his logical philosophical tract. Better.

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: