http://noncompositional.com/2009/08/graduate-promote-advance/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:04:39 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 http://noncompositional.com/2009/08/graduate-promote-advance/comment-page-1/#comment-41473 Russell Wed, 02 Sep 2009 22:40:27 +0000 http://noncompositional.com/?p=376#comment-41473 <p>Agreed. A different but similar case might be substitute vs replace. "Technically," if you replace X with Y, then you substitute Y for X. But people say they substitute X for Y, or X with Y all the time (and have done so for a while). As I recall this was in part helped along by passive constructions which made it less clear which arguments were expressed which way. Similarly, it looks like using "promote" in this way is mostly in the "the promoting X" context, where perhaps the fact that there is innovation is hidden.</p> Agreed. A different but similar case might be substitute vs replace. “Technically,” if you replace X with Y, then you substitute Y for X. But people say they substitute X for Y, or X with Y all the time (and have done so for a while). As I recall this was in part helped along by passive constructions which made it less clear which arguments were expressed which way. Similarly, it looks like using “promote” in this way is mostly in the “the promoting X” context, where perhaps the fact that there is innovation is hidden.

]]> http://noncompositional.com/2009/08/graduate-promote-advance/comment-page-1/#comment-41430 Michal Boleslav Měchura Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:40:00 +0000 http://noncompositional.com/?p=376#comment-41430 <p>As you say yourself, it looks like these three words are copying one another's syntactic behaviour because they belong in the same semantic class. In other words, "graduate", "promote" and "advance" are beginning to behave the same way syntactically because they mean (almost) the same thing semantically. I'd say this is a pretty common process in language evolution, although I can't think of another example right now.</p> As you say yourself, it looks like these three words are copying one another’s syntactic behaviour because they belong in the same semantic class. In other words, “graduate”, “promote” and “advance” are beginning to behave the same way syntactically because they mean (almost) the same thing semantically. I’d say this is a pretty common process in language evolution, although I can’t think of another example right now.

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