Noncompositional

It’s recently come to my attention that I haven’t been putting enough attention into this thing. Well, that’s because classes have started and I would like to pass them. So I’ll start off with the oblinks to other places (probably pointless because I’d guess that the people who read my blog are a subset of the people who read the blogs that I might link to).

First, over at Literal-minded, Neal has posted on gradable adjectives, and in particular on their (non)comparability depending on which scale they evoke, and whether the scales are closed- or open-ended, and so on. He mentions a recent paper by Chris Kennedy and Louise McNally on gradable adjectives (in a recent issue of Language, if you’ve got it). I only bring it up, well, first because it’s interesting, and second, because I also began reading this paper a few days ago on a hunch that it might be useful for looking at the interaction between quantifiers like less/few and their interaction with aspectual verbs. Of course that issue isn’t addressed directly in the paper (that I’ve read - I don’t imagine it is, though), but the paper is an interesting read.

Second, over at phonoloblog, this post on [nt] reduction in words like continental. My point here, though, is not the content of the post itself, or even the content of the comments, but instead the use of “indeed” by Bert Vaux in his post, as he confirms that he did indeed work on a related problem with a student. I’d like you to read the relevant comments (first Bridget’s then Bert’s), and then consider the possibility of first Bert posting a comment with content similar to Bridget’s, and then later Bridget prefacing her comment with “Bert (Vaux) and I did indeed discuss this” or “I did indeed work with Bert on…” or whatever. I think it sounds odd. (Of course I’m assuming something about the professional relationship between the people involved. It may not be true, but then just pretend it’s true of some other pair of people.)

Indeed minimally asserts the speaker’s stance towards the truthfulness of the proposition, but since this is usually assumed, indeed also gets to convey the idea of confirmation or even countering an implicit doubt. I could give a rough statistic, like about 1/3 of web pages indexed by Google also have actually. Of course, if we consider the confirm/erase-doubts meaning to be somehow backwards-referring in that it makes the hearer think back to what proposition is being confirmed or reaffirmed, then we must also recognize another use of indeed which is almost anticipatory. These are the uses that occur often with and, as in … just to be able to indict and indeed prosecute and indeed jail traffickers and those who have been involved. So the counts are deceiving, and indeed probably worthless.

Getting back to the odd switcharoo, if all there was to it was confirmation, then reversing the roles should be fine. The mere act of confirming something does not require one to be in a position of authority over the person who originally made the proposition. However, consider what it means to confirm something when there was no request for the confirmation in the first place. Ah, then we’ve got some indication of interpersonal relationships. When someone with a less powerful social position takes the position of confirming, that is, validating, the claims of someone higher up, this can have the effect of an undermining of authority.

Now, here’s my question: are there any effects on authority from the degree of involvement in a collaborative effort? Since essentially the senior member gets to control the story if he or she wants to (including confirming it), what happens when there is no clear seniority? How do you decide who gets to control the story? Is it possible that if one member clearly put in more effort that they get ownership? And can involvement in some cases trump seniority? And how do you negotiate this with the audience of the story-telling who may or may not be aware of these subtle differences?

Well, that’s about it for now. The next post I have in mind should be good and linguisticy.