Noncompositional

I offer a few tidbits of linguistic observations made over the past day.

First, a professor explaining to the class how we will be looking at controversial, interesting, complicated, etc. aspects of linguistics, and there is a lot we won’t get to. She says (paraphrasing): We want to make our best effort as possible.

Second, a professor reflecting on issues of theories of derivation in a past decade of research, and referring in particular to a (defunct) view of derivation: That pretty much…has problems. Nice defeat of expectations regarding (I think) specificity of the predicate (”having problems” isn’t really a good enough summary to go with “pretty much.” What did he do when you told him that? — ??He pretty much responded (though cf. the good He pretty much responded like I thought he would)

Finally, an exchange between me and a colleague. We were looking at a computer monitor that was showing a screen saver that involved creating landscape-looking images (mountains and plains) with some sort of randomized curve-generating function. -Me: Must create landscape-looking images. -Him: Hh, that would be a really strange biological imperative. Must…create…landscape-looking…images. -Me: Yeah. Though didn’t whatshisname in… (pause) -Him: Oh god, you mean in…Close Encounters of the Third Kind? -Me: Yeah.

That’s some complex thinking that led my friend to infer what I was asking. I mean, there are so many possibilities for completing my question. Well, first, you already know it’s a question because there’s SAI. There’s also the implications of it being a negative question, such as: it could be a rhetorical question, in which case the actual yes-no answer isn’t that important (IOW, it’s obvious). Second, you’ve got though, which indicates that whatever message I convey will be contrary to some previous/salient proposition - say, “…would be a weird biological imperative.” Finally, there’s the preposition in. I pointed out that it could have been a year or a location, or many other things, and my friend replied that the “star in film” meaning was more likely. But thinking about it afterwards, I wondered why. For instance, it seems (armchair-intuitively) that in conversation, the sequence NP PP-in VP is not likely to be about NP doing VP at time PP. It’s common to see Spielberg in 1994 released the blockbuster…, and so on, but in conversation it might be more normal (common, even?) to have the PP in front, or to have back in [year] either before or after the subject NP. An interpretation where the in introduces a location is probably pretty marked in conversation as well. So, intuitively it seems like all signs point to me trying to communicate: “Ah, it seems weird, but consider the fact that such-and-such in some movie had exactly that imperative.”