Re: Evolution of Applicatives

From:    And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
> Tom:
> From:    John Cowan <cowan@...>
> > > Eh?  Are you confused by my use of "topic"?  I don't mean it in the
> > > linguistic sense, but rather as a synonym for "subject matter".
> >
> > Ah, well, we *were* talking about linguistics on a rather formal
> > level, so I just assumed... but I still can't get any reading other
> > with Tuesday as the patient, and not as the day.  I'm pretty sure
> > that most English speakers will agree with me in this respect.
>
> I agree with John. Most English speakers massively overgenerate
> false negatives, when it comes to acceptability judgements.
I certainly won't deny this to an extent.  When I was TA an intro
class, there were a few students who rejected topicalizations like
"Him, I know".  But when there are many, many people, especially
those who are trained to be introspective about their language use
(under what conditions they do and don't use some construction)
who reject something, I would have to say this represents a real
feature of language variation.  As I mentioned in my last post to
John, I asked around the department and sent out a survey to our
departmental list, and out of more than 10 responses, all said
that "Tuesday was being written on" would be ungrammatical in the
meaning I was using it for (where "Tuesday" is a time of the weak).

> > Again, this isn't relevant. *"The NEA was given money to by
> > liberal activists" is grossly ungrammatical, and that's the analogous
> > structure you're invoking.
>
> It's usually considered ungrammatical, but in fact I've collected
> quite a corpus of actual nonerror examples,
What criteria did you use to make sure they're not errors? I'm not
trying to say you're wrong (I don't know), just that it's not clear
to me how one would be systematic about this.  Wouldn't one have to
keep a careful record of an individual's actual "error" rates and
compare a given example to that?

Again, I must repeat my concern about statistical corpus studies.
They can be valid, but by virtue of abstracting over speakers, it's
not clear exactly *what* they are describing sometimes.

> and I suspect that the
> constraint is semantic rather than syntactic, though I haven't been
> able to put my finger on what it is.
I wouldn't be surprised if semantics played an important role here
too.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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