Conjoin them, and fast!
These days it seems all the rage to write about funky coordinations (the cool kids are calling them WTF coordinations, ’cause only cool kids get to use the fun words). Well, after a fun conversation the other day about what part of speech rather than might be (“separable conjunction,” anyone? For lunch today, (rather than salad) he ate pasta (rather than salad)), this sort of topic was on my mind. And so this morning, something popped into my head: do it, and fast!
Interesting, I thought. And so I ran a search over the BNC for this pattern, which was rather hard-to-specify in terms that are general enough to my liking. So I’m using [N , and|but ADV|ADJ] as a first pass (the search for adjectives is mostly to include mis-tagged adverbs). The results are interesting. For but, the adverbs are:
slowly (2), quick, naturally, differently, silently, soberly, indistinctly
For and:
quickly (6), soon (4), fast (3), gladly (2), neatly, rightly, neatly, quick
Pretty clearly, adverbs that have to do with speed, particularly faster-than-normal speed, are highly preferred by this construction. This is basically a way to add on more peripheral (“optional”) information to the main statement, and outside adverbs you can see this all around, in utterances like {Look at | This is} what I got, and for $10 to boot!. Of course, with complex events like buying, there’s a lot of extra information (like price, vendor, etc.) that you can tack on but that wouldn’t necessarily be missed if you omitted them altogether. This goes double for manner adverbs, since they can go with most predicators without a hitch. That’s one reason I find it intriguing that so many adverbs expressing speed or relative time are found in this particuar construction (relative to other manner adverbs). One possible cause – a lot of imperatives. When you want someone to do something, and correctly (haha), you’d better make sure they know all the necessary details. Judging from the examples I found, I guess in many cases where special affordances are made, speed is important.
And now, to do what I do best (bring conversations back to the Japanese language), I wonder: what sort of information is most commonly postposed in Japanese sentences? Basically, in Japanese (as I’ve mentioned earlier) the main predicator is always clause-final. However, the speaker can often tag on extra arguments after the verb (and any sentence-final particles), probably for clarification purposes. I’ve never heard of non-argument constituents getting put there, but perhaps it’s possible. At least, I’d predict it would be possible with adverbial forms of adjectival nouns, which would look like “dative” arguments after the verb. With normal de-adjectival adverbs (which end in ku), the result seems less than perfect. As soon as I’m on a computer with Japanse input capability I’ll have to check that out.
Finally, just some food for thought: (1) available for $30 and up, (2)time and again