Noncompositional

Okay, the other construction regarding say. As is often the case with constructions, the phenomenon can go along with a long introduction or an abbreviated one, and since I have a seminar to attend shortly, I’m going with the short one. [interesting that this statement is as true now as it was when I first drafted the post]

The word as can be used to parenthetically introduce a clause that has a proposition-denoting clause missing. Oh, just look at these sentences:

• CxG is lame, as most people told me __
• As (it) __ often happens to me of late, I was about to fall asleep when I remembered something very important that I’d forgotten to take care of.
• Ducks and cows, as you have repeatedly proven __ in your research, have well-defined local dialects.

These have a certain external distribution, the determination of which is left as an exercise to the reader; or read Chris Potts’ papers (in 2002) on the matter, though a counterexample to one of his major claims is already present in this post. Now, what I thought I’d found was a case where using say as the subordinate predicate (i.e., as…say), then you got to put it in places where you couldn’t with other verbs. For instance (from Google searches):

• The, as they say in America, “London Times” thinks that comics are mysoginistic.
• He says being the [as he says] “Ober, metal nerd” that he says he is, he knew exactly who Hansi was.
• When going through the (as they say) “granitic” oceanic crust, which in the Marianas Trench would be 180 million years old, you would certainly not find
• What the, as they say, F?

I can’t think of any other verb that can take the place of say in cases like this, where it appears right before a head noun (or at least none that sounds as natural or conventional). Of course, this has a rather particular metalinguistic function, namely something like, “don’t attribute the (common) use of this term to me.” In this use it can go anywhere, really, but in a sentence like Carrie has, as they say, gone postal, it is indistinguishable structurally from Carrie has, as the news reported, gone postal.

But then it hit me: duh! These can’t be the same uses, because the subordinate clause isn’t missing a proposition-denoting complement clause, but something more like a quotation. That is, they say “London Times” here in America and he says (he is a) “ober, metal nerd”. So we have a problem. The first as, as described by Potts, wants a clause missing a proposition. The metalinguistic uses aren’t missing a proposition, so they’re not the same as, so say doesn’t change anything’s distribution. And in fact, the as that goes along with a “quotative” verb does have this wider distribution:

• His technician took pictures with both cameras, the one with the flash and the, as I call it, rapid photo
• [constructed] Later versions of the product will be packaged with several, as they are referred to in the business, “pieces of extra shit.”

Oh well. Ah! But notice the final two sentences. The first has a verb call, which takes two (postverbal) nominal complements (call it rapid-photo); the as allows the second one to go missing. The second has a verb refer, which takes a PP-to and a PP-as (refer to it as shit); but there is no second “as”! That is, you don’t say as they are referred to in the business as.

(Google-notes: (i) okay, you can use two ass if you want, but expect strange looks from some people, (ii) I have found a couple of cases of quotative uses of claim with as)