Booksellers, diaries, talking
First, two short tidbits. Starting from booksellers: a recent post from Mark Liberman prompted be to check out You’re Wearing That on Amazon. Turns out that it’s currently ranked #31 in sales, and was at #24 yesterday. That’s pretty cool.
Second, a speech error. The other day we were discussing various types of subjectless sentences in English, and so the topic turned at one point to diary style English (Woke up. Went to School. Got Schooled). One person who was trying, I suppose, to create an adjectival form of “dairy (style)” came up spontaneously with journalistic. Whoops. But if you start with journal as a (sub)type of diary, and then access its (listed) adjectival form, then you’ve got journalistic. Unfortunately, that word means something rather different.
Finally: I recently realized that there’s an interesting use of (pseudo-)transitive talk, and it looks something like this:
A: I’ll be coming over. B: When? A: I don’t know, later. B: Okay, are we talking 9pm here, or are we talking midnight?
Transitive talk has several (rather old) senses, just as old as the intransitive senses. They include ‘to express in speech’ To heare heresyes talked and lette the talkers alone., ‘to speak a particular language, have a manner of speaking’ He speaks French/slang, and ‘to have a discussion about’ Let’s talk business.
It seems to me that the last sense has a rather narrow distribution, in that you can’t just talk anything. It seems as though the topic of discourse has to be vague or wide enough to cover a range of sub-topics. So it’s possible for a teacher and a student to talk homework in a case where the student is having trouble with grades, but it seems weird to talk the solution to part 2 of last night’s homework. Somehow this can’t just be about the teacher telling the students what the solution is, or even having a little discussion about it. It would have to be a major enough topic that it could take up a good chunk of time discussing it.
But this is definitely a different sense from we’re talking huge, here, people. I don’t know exactly how to define what it means, but maybe something like: ‘what I am talking about should be understood as [blah].’ It’s not a way of directly summarizing what you’re saying, but it’s a way of taking some topic of discourse and elaborating it by adding some description to it. The discription could be evaluative in nature, and so this evaluation becomes significant in the discourse, and so acts as a sort of “point” of the story (a la Labov, I suppose). But don’t take “evaluation” too literally, since talking 9pm isn’t all that evaluative - it just adds extra specification to some attribute that is important to the discourse.
Interesting to me is the limited distribution of this guy. Basically, it has to be anchored to the current discourse situation. Thus you can’t really use it to describe what someone else was saying: #he was talking huge, #he said they were crazy. he was talking zombies. Nor can it be about something the speaker has or will done: #I’ll be talking huge freaking inferno.
I wonder if the “talk business” usage wasn’t originally generated by analogy with “Let’s talk Swedish, etc.” Even though I think it’s slightly more standard to “speak” another language, people often enoguh seem to use talk for this purpose. (”I didn’t understand him; he was talking Chinese…”, etc.) If so, this would explain why, as you say, “it would have to be a major enough topic that it could take up a good chunk of time discussing it.” I.e., the usage isn’t the same as talking about something, it’s for whatever will be the overall tenor of the conversation, even involving (in some cases like business or science) a jargon all its own.
Just a thought.
It’s tempting, but unfortunately the use of “talk [language]” is attested (in the OED) only back to 1859 “talk slang.” The use with a particular language, “talk French and German,” is attested in 1886.
On the other hand, the usage of “talk business” they have back as far as 1387. I was surprised at this. Their example is: “He..talkede with hym fiftene dayes the gospel.” Other usages are similar, leading up to “talk shop,” first listed attestation in 1854. That’s four years before “talk slang.” So it seems as though this “converse widely about some topic” use rather old, with the restriction just as.
It would have been useful for me to contrast “let’s talk the solution to problem 2a” with “let’s talk about the solution to problem 2a.” Now, I don’t deny that the second sentence means that there will be a rather long discussion about something rather specific. Something about about coerces such a reading. It just seems that transitive talk has a tougher time coercing that meaning. This is probably not something about the semantics of talk per se, just the fact that phrases like talk business are so conventional that it takes more “work” to use them with other words (homework, houses) let alone with something that is not conventionally associated with topics.
There are also seeming-exceptions to my “anchored to the current” discourse comment re: “talking huge.” You can have sentences like
she must have been talking godzilla-huge
she must have been midnight, not just 9pm
Something about the epistemic modality here lets you say this, I think.