Three Dollar Quill

Hm. Another day, another weird mental state. Let's just work through some sentences quickly and see what difficulties they present.

• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the eagle sees the soldiers.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as an eagle would see the soldiers.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the eagle sees its prey.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as an eagle would see its prey.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the elephant hears the soldiers.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as an elephant would hear the soldiers.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the elephant hears the rockslide.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as an elephant would hear a rockslide.

I'm mostly interested in the result of variation along particular axes, but I figured I'd fill in all of the possible combinations.

The idea I'm looking for is to move parts of verb phrases to particular locations. The full "deep" phrases are:

• "sees the soldiers clearly"
• "would see the soldiers clearly"
• "sees the eagle's prey clearly"
• "would see the eagle's prey clearly"
• "hears the soldiers clearly"
• "would hear the soldiers clearly"
• "hears the rockslide clearly"
• "would hear a rockslide clearly"

... and those don't actually present the problems I was worried about.

• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the clouds disperse quickly.
• The lookout would see the soldiers as clearly as the clouds would disperse quickly.
• The lookout sees the soldiers as clearly as the eagle sees its prey hungrily.

If I were editing this, those sentences would be less awkward, but the awkwardness shouldn't interact with the grammatical questions I'm trying to deal with. Those sentences deal with the idea of dividing the verb phrase parts into, like, TAM, action, manner. The thing I'm trying to figure out is if I want them to all be separate constituents, or not. Part of the issue is that I want to make all of the basic words be verbs.

...

I just realized that doing this with transitive verbs made everything more confusing for me.

• The man runs faster than the dog runs.
• The man runs faster than the dog eats.
• The man runs faster than the dog runs gracefully.

Some of these sentences seem nonsensical or awkward, but the Divines would explain that this is simply the result of our quaintly limited perspective.

The more I think about this, the more I think I'm going to need to make use of anaphora, but in a way, that just makes it better, because now there are a bunch of weird special-purpose words.

Also a lot of weird reflexives, but I don't have the energy to work that out tonight.

Good night.