Noncompositional

Hanging around linguistics people gets you some interesting tidbits. For example, try searching newsgroups for patterns like “accentuated her” or “accents his.” Go ahead and try it.

That particular bit came up in a discussion regarding the domain of emphasis (highlighting, underscoring, accenting, playing up, stressing, and so on). And in that discussion a term was mentioned that I’ve been hearing a lot lately, but which has been around for a while: semantic prosody. The old example is the verb cause, which likes to appear with (subordinate) events that have some negative evaluation (caused the accident, catastrophe, storm, the disaster, the explosion, a meltdown, a scandal), though positive events are not ruled out by any means. There are many other cases where certain types of complements or modifiers are preferred, something that comes out when doing a collocate search in a corpus.

This intersected with an e-mail I’d read about someone who’d gone to get an eye exam and noticed that all the staff at the office prefaced their requests and directives with go ahead and. Go ahead and think about that. Now, using go ahead and before a request “softens” the request; though it’s still an imperative in form, it sounds more like a request than a command. But not just anything can be used with it, given its discourse function: #go ahead and shut up is odd, though please shut up is fine. I suppose it has to be something that the speaker thinks is beneficial to the addressee. And if you’re wondering about the semantic restrictions of the (content of the) request, just consider these (from google searches):

went ahead and cooked in the shelter and figured I would go ahead and stay there. I’m gonna have to ask you to go ahead and stop posting now, mmkay? Ah well it looks like I’ll just go ahead and not do anything major to the car until…

Though the last sentence could be interpreted as ‘keep going along in my current state (or doing other things, just) not doing anything to the car,’ the others are pretty funny, I think.

And speaking of prosody, is it just me or does go ahead and appear a lot in sarcastic utterances (particularly with just, though that may also have some sort of “sarcastic prosody”)?

Oh yeah, just go ahead and burst our perfect little bubble picture of Valdi… your [sic] no fun. Just go ahead and sit on that big bed of yours, watching TV, see what I care…

And finally, just to mention future plans: I’m currently reading a book called The Languages of China by S. Robert Ramsey, and recently finished The Establishment of Modern Chinese Grammar, so expect some Chinese language talk soon.

[edit: just some small edits made. no need to be alarmed]