Re: USAGE: "all"

On Sun, 29 Jun 2003, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 29, 2003 at 09:39:18AM -0700, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:
> > > I'm wondering what the word "all" is doing in
> > > sentences such as "I love them all" (. . . "and all of them love
> > > me", sang Matron "Mama" Morton in _Chicago_).
> >
> > Personally, I'd call it an intensive. The grammar
> > of the sentence doesn't change when you remove
> > "all"; but there is a slight shift in nuance.
>
> Semantically, the "all" is clarifying the meaning of the
> pronoun.  "I love them."  "Which of them?"  "All of them."
>
> > Same with "God bless us all..." Maybe even with
> > "yall" (<you all). [I don't have yall as a
> > plural; for me you all is an intensive.]
>
> Well, whether it's your regular plural or not, it is another
> example of the phenomenon I'm asking about.  The semantics
> differ but the grammar is the same. :)
>
> > > Is it just a commaless appositive?
> >
> > Where would you put a comma and why?
>
> I wouldn't; I was just remarking that *if* it is an appositive (which
> means that the "all" is actually being equated with the "them"),
> then it's the commaless variety.  In other examples where a word is
> unquestionably an appositive, English sometimes uses a comma to set
> it off and sometimes not.  Compare "My brother, Jacob, is coming over
> this weekend." with "My brother Jacob is coming over this weekend."
> A becommaed version of "I love them all" might be "I love them,
> all of them.
According to the grammar handbook I use in teaching Eng 102, putting
commas around Jacob in that sentence would be a punctuation  error,
because Jacob is a restrictive appositive. The rule is that restrictive
appositives are not set off by commas, while unrestrictive ones are.
Floyd C. Watkins et al. Practical English Handbook 11th Ed. Houghton
Mifflin 2001:224. The example given is "Toni Morrison's novel Beloved
has been highly praised." The relationship between "novel" and "Beloved"
appears to be the same as that between "brother" and "Jacob" in your
sentence. In both examples the first word is a common noun and the second
word is a proper name and hence restrictive (defining which brother,
which novel). I would certainly put a comma before "all of them" in
the "all" example--but then, that is not a restrictive appositive in
quite the same way that a proper name might be. It is not narrowing the
group described--in fact, depending on context, it might be widening it.
   John Leland

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