Most of them always men
Okay, this I just had to share. It’s on the boundary, I’d say, between mess-up and something a competence-grammarian should account for (I’m currently waiting for Mark Liberman to get back of my latest comment on that topic).
And like you, I have significant difficulties with women. Most of my friends are and always have been men. (link
I really want to know how most people (whose brains haven’t been fried on syntax and semantics) react to this sort of sentence.
Posted April 20, 2009 to Linguistics, Meaning, Use
Tags: coordination, semantics, syntax
Comments(6)
Tags: coordination, semantics, syntax
Comments(6)
“Most of my friends are men and it has always been the case that most of my friends are men.” I have no trouble getting this read right off the bat.
No claim from me that it’s hard to get it, simply that naive (most?) views of coordination will understand this sentence to mean “…and most of my friends always have been men.” Which invites one (or at least me) to imagine that some of her friends had a gender-change at some point.
I agree with PC. At first I was going to say that I think it is because having TG friends is less common than always having had men as friends, but actually I think it’s the fact that the speaker is saying something about herself and how she relates to women and men, and that would imply to me that she’s making a more thorough statement by saying something both about the present (“Most of my friends are … men.”) as well as the past (“Most of my friends … have always been men.”). Were she talking about TGs versus non-TGs, the other interpretation would seem more reasonable.
Well, my point wasn’t about the clarity or obviousness of what she said, but rather that simple notions of the grammar of the sentence might be insufficient to capture the appropriateness of her statement (though now I am doubting that).
At the same time, I note that what the woman wrote was “…always have been” whereas you have “have always been.” Could be a fluke, but I wonder if there are any tendencies to interpret them in different ways.
Consider a case where one maintains exactly three male friends at all times, the identities of whom change throughout one’s life. Would it be equally idiomatic to say “three of my friends always have been men” or “three of my friends have always been men”?
Actually, I find the latter more amenable to expressing a fact about three particular friends who have never undergone a sex change, with the former more amenable to there have always been three male friends in my life, whoever they have been.
[...] always been men By arnoldzwicky Recently on his blog, Russell Lee-Goldman looked at a moderately complex example that led to some discussion of (1) Most [...]
Most of my friend are men. Most of my friends always have been men.
Sweet…