Noncompositional

…language is complicated. Just a few examples from recent life.

At work, I wanted to speak with someone (call him W), but he was on the phone. I ended up having to leave before I could talk W, though waved a piece of paper in front of him with the most important piece of information that I wanted to transmit to him. Much later, I encountered W and we had a conversation. I asked him, “who were you talking to earlier?” His answer was, “Probably Sarah.” (changing the name). This is like those sentences like since you asked, I’m planning a trip to Hawaii or if you’re thirsty, there’s juice in the fridge, where the first halves of the sentences give motivation for saying the second half (”since you asked, I’ll now tell you: [...],” and “if you’re thirsty, you should know–therefore I tell you: [...]“). Though it’s a little harder to paraphrase “probably Sarah.” Maybe, “Since I’ve talked with many people throughout the day, you haven’t picked out a small enough set that I can answer definitively, but since I know you’re probably asking about a phone conversation that you’re sure I had (and not ones that you didn’t witness but might conjecture that I’ve had), and further, you probably want to know about the person whose conversation with me prevented us from talking earlier, you probably want to know that person’s identity; it’s Sarah.”

Next, consider hold on. Consider trying to use it outside of an imperative. I can think of one good situation: Someone says to you, “Hold on.” You reply, “holding on.” Okay, now consider hold it. Can it be used outside an imperative? Maybe the previous situation will work. A: Hold it! B: Holding it. That sounds rather more ridiculous than “holding on.” Ah, language.

And a mini-update. I’ve finished my first reading of the the x-er the y-er article. Good points: lots of cross-linguistic data from various Indo-European languages, mostly English and Dutch, but also some Russian, Hungarian, Hindi and German; lots of English-internal data that place the construction in a paradigm with other sorts of similar constructions; detailed explication of historical versions of the construction. Not-so-good points: no specification of lexical entries, thus (from a Minimalist point of view) no explicit formulation of how the entire structure comes to exist; requires positing phonologically null elements left and right that may not exist elsewhere in the language; no attempt to demonstrate semantic compositionality; unclear how to guarantee the ungrammaticality of having just one half of the construction; absolutely no mention of sentences like the bigger the better or the wider the drum, the louder the sound (only considers sentences with verbal predicates). More to come.