Noncompositional

No new real content. However, I just point out that for some followup on this post on event nominals, or to see some legal narrative-type-stuff, you could head over to my academic website (which might be here). And for some followup on things discussed here (took me forever to remember where that stuff was), then…uh, wait a few days until I clean up and post some handouts for a presentation on it.

At the recent BLS meeting, Susan Buescher (UNM) gave a paper on the discourse function of the class of verbs known (to me) as verbs of cognition (to her as cognitive verbs). (Get the abstract here) She looked in the Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English at the distributional properties of a set of six or so verbs like think, believe, know, wonder, and understand for some properties that might illuminate how they are used in conversation. She looked at prosodic features (like the presence of a prosodic break after the main verb), frequent subject collocations, and some sort of syntactic independence (like appearing without a complement).

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A report on the BLS is indeed forthcoming. I hope to at least mention my thoughts on a paper on the reputed discourse/epistemic uses of verbs of cognition in English, and possibly my thoughts on (others’ thoughts on) some papers on point-of-view and deictics.

And the title of this post comes from a line is a piece of spam I got today: discover back your youth.

to the 32nd annual BLS meeting, that is. This year’s meeting looks to be quite a good one (when are they not?!). A report may be forthcoming.

After a rather long discussion today in a reading group regarding the possibility of obviating Principle C violations with extraposition (e.g., I have him[i] a book yesterday that I’m sure Biff[i] will like), wherein several people were absolutely solid in their opinion that extraposition couldn’t save the violation, I found tonight’s episode of the Conan O’Brian show rather funny.

Instead of the normal monologue, they parodied the State of the Union address with a State of the State address. The fake news commentator was announcing the names of people entering the studio (This is Joe Shmoe, Conan’s executive producer, and he’s followed by …”). I was then rewarded with this line:

“Here comes Conan’s spiritual advisor, Father Delaney. And he is followed by Delaney’s spiritual advisor, Rabbi Moskowitz.”

Excellent. Now, of course there was an ever-so-slight contrastive stress on Delaney, and as we all know, contrastive stress makes everything better (or did it make the world go round? maybe it makes the WORLD go aROUND).

I’ve been thinking a lot about scales lately: scales that come packaged with gradable adjectives, those that are pragmatically constructed, the ones that tell you that you weigh too much. This morning I was thinking about a particular construction that talks about (for lack of a better term) sufficiency with respect to scales. The basic form is [A as N is, X], where A is an adjective (phrase), N is a noun (phrase), and X is some clause.

• Rich as she is, she can buy anything he wants.
• Rich as she is, she still probably couldn’t afford a house in this part of town
• Short as he is, he could still pass for a child / he could use his student ID card for the rest of his life.
• Short as he is, he would never pass for an elementary school student.

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