Re: Evolution of Applicatives

Tom Wier (with whom I pretty much agree) wrote:
> 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".
Yes, and I can remember in classes with the Gods Lakoff and McCawley-- when
they'd say "X is ungrammatical" there would invariably be 2 or 3 who'd pipe
up "It sounds alright to me...". George also introduced the amusing use of
the little Star of David to mark sentences that were acceptable only in
Yiddish-influenced English.

 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 week).
Your last clause in parens is the operative one. And as someone pointed out,
"on" is polysemous -- 1.locative 2. temporal 3."concerning".  (2) cannot be
passivized, the others can. (Verb + on, as "to put on= to don (clothing);"
is another matter.)

Languages that use other prepositions/constructions to distinguish the 3
senses of "on" (no doubt many, or most), simply don't have the problem.
(They may have other problem areas, of course :-) )


>
> > > 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?
S's like "The NEA was given money to..." strike me as performance errors,
the mouth getting ahead of the brain, tangled syntax-- they're still
interpreted correctly.  As opposed to completely garbled (NEA the was given
to money) or nonsense (the shelf ran the truth). Also, they often require
some rather specific context for their interpretation:
(discussing a fund drive) "The Red Cross was frequently given to"-- which
sounds like bureaucratese to me.

"When I said 'Tuesday was written on', I meant I'd written a poem about
Tuesday."

Or: Student to teacher: I want to write a paper on the Pyramids.
Teacher: Find a better topic. The pyramids have already been written on.