Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

From:    Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
> Thomas Wier wrote:
> > one's keys.  And such logical mismatches are even more deeply
> > embedded, since a sentence like "Every man saw three dogs" has
> > (for the vast majority of English speakers) precisely two readings:
> > one where there is a set of three specific dogs which every man
> > saw, and one where for every man, he saw three dogs, but not
> > necessarily the same three dogs across the set of every man. So,
>
> Isn't that just a problem with trying to read more into a sentence than
> the words imply? You can't tell if all of the dogs were seen at the same
> time and place or one after the other in different places. Why would you
> expect to be able to tell if each man saw the exact same three dogs, if
> this is unspecified? If it's a significant fact, it can be expressed as
> "every man saw the three dogs", or to be extra clear, "every man saw the
> same three dogs". English has many problems, but trying to find one in
> "every man saw three dogs" when there are much more radical problems in
> other areas seems a bit strange.
Well, it isn't just a trivial problem.  Of course context will usually
clarify which of the two scopal readings is possible, but not always.
That's a crucial point, because it indicates that pragmatic implicatures
are formally distinct from the truth-conditional semantic values a given
utterance may have.  And besides that, the goal of linguistics is to
describe what it means to "know" a language, and without any such context,
English speakers will generally readily agree on these judgements as
something they know, and they will not accept other possible judgements
(such that one or the other quantifier obligatorily takes wide scope).

The point I was trying to make, in re idioms, was that languages differ
on precisely such points:  languages with nominal scrambling like Japanese
IIRC do not get the same scope ambiguities that English does. So, trying
to define what is an idiom, and what isn't, is not a straightforward
enterprise, since there is a real sense in which any difference between
languages is "idiomatic".  We cannot just reduce the set of idioms to
semantically noncompositional constructions like "kick the bucket",
since there are other kinds of purely structural noncompositionality.

 =========================================================================
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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