Difference between revisions of "English Syntactic Musings"
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===Who's this question for?=== | ===Who's this question for?=== | ||
''"Is "Frannie and Zooey" any good, Alex?"'', when Alex is the only person in the area reading a book - why does it feel necessary to append the person's name if you weren't talking to them before, but they're the only person within earshot to whom the question could pertain? (Abraver, 31Jul05) | ''"Is "Frannie and Zooey" any good, Alex?"'', when Alex is the only person in the area reading a book - why does it feel necessary to append the person's name if you weren't talking to them before, but they're the only person within earshot to whom the question could pertain? (Abraver, 31Jul05) | ||
| + | * Because someone else might try to make "Frannie and Zooey" make sense in their understanding of the world, and ask "Who's that?" or "Yeah, I like them", or something silly like that. | ||
| + | |||
Back to [[Linguistic Musings]] | Back to [[Linguistic Musings]] | ||
Revision as of 02:44, 1 August 2005
Contents
Verb + it
Examples
- "Why don't we Tiki/Dominoes/Usdan/Sherman it." Refers to where food is to be acquired.
- "I think I'll walk/drive/Branvan/Shuttle-bus it." Refers to mode of transportation to be used.
Comments, Hypotheses
Seems to refer to a certain means to some end. Usdan is the means of food, Branvan is the means of transportation, etc.
Sentences that parse oddly for non-obvious reasons
- "That thing has such corrupt memory that memtest86 (which loads straight from grub) crashes and sometimes is fortunate enough to reset the computer while doing so."
- "I think it could be that stupidity manifests itself as evil, or evil itself as stupidity." (ABraver, 27Jul05)
- itself is bound to the verb, so if you drop the verb, gotta get rid of itself too
Pragmatics
Who's this question for?
"Is "Frannie and Zooey" any good, Alex?", when Alex is the only person in the area reading a book - why does it feel necessary to append the person's name if you weren't talking to them before, but they're the only person within earshot to whom the question could pertain? (Abraver, 31Jul05)
- Because someone else might try to make "Frannie and Zooey" make sense in their understanding of the world, and ask "Who's that?" or "Yeah, I like them", or something silly like that.
Back to Linguistic Musings
