Re: Tense marked on nouns

Doug Dee said:
> In a message dated 6/3/2004 3:00:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> mark@POLYMATHIX.COM writes:
>
>>The verb 'impact' is neologistic in my lifetime, for example.
>
> You must be older than I thought.
Probably, but not for the reason you think. :)


> The OED has these citations:
>
> 1935: "For there was about them an air of eagerness and of shuddering
> expectation which impacted on his consciousness and fascinated even while
> it repelled
> him."
> 1929: "Something impacted with a soft thud against Lingard's temple."
> 1791: "Impact fire into iron, by hammering it when red hot."

My use of the term 'neologistic' was misleading: I was referring to usage,
not just any documented instance of literary license -- and I realize that
many (maybe most) people use the term to refer to _any_ form that seems
innovative. I don't find the term 'neologism' very useful except in
reference to usage, because (a) innovation of the one-off kind is
ubiquitous and relatively uneventful (except when it's particularly clever
in a literary genre, e.g. Shakespeare's 'enskied', and even that is
_linguistically_ uneventful), and (b) trying to get a handle on what is or
is not an innovation forces you to draw a line somewhere on the
productivity continuum -- which is infinitely more difficult (and
suspicious, because hard to motivate) to do than drawing a line somewhere
on the usage continuum (which can be a function of rather straightforward
descriptive statistics over an appropriately characterized corpus).

(I didn't choose to be any more specific at the time of my offending post
because I only wanted to state an obvious and commonplace example of
unmarked derivation that still has a diachronic feel to it -- and 'impact'
remains that regardless.)


-- Mark