Thursday, April 8th, 2004

Time	Event
5:33p	Yes, I'm a grammar god. Next. And no I didn't fill the thing in. I didn't complete it, anyway: it insisted on all questions being answered, I insisted that at least four of its lists of choices were bollocks. Impasse. So we'll never know its opinion of the matter. The usual boring illiterate garbage anyway: some nong who thinks that punctuation and spelling are forms of grammar and taller than she is still in English. (P.S. My ardent ambition is to enchange the English tongue as much as I can.) In real life, not the illiterate fantasy world of the quiz-makers (lesson 14, repetition is for emphasis), there are real problems of grammar interacting with punctuation. The BBC have an article on asteroid protection that contains this baffling sentence: He said that given decades of warning to prevent an impact only requires that the orbital velocity of an asteroid be altered by a small amount, less than of order one cm per second. What requires? It took me ages to work out how to parse it. The editing error in the end, 'of order', turns out to be irrelevant: there was no splicing up above it. What requires? An impact? Warning to prevent an impact? Decades of warning? All it's missing is a comma. He said that given decades of warning, to prevent an impact only requires... It's perfectly grammatical and unambiguous, and if the comma had been in there you would read it with a perfectly natural intonation, without a second thought. But there must be some parsing principle that says to attach to-infinitives to something preceding if at all possible. In other news, I was relieved to learn this morning that today was only Thursday. That's one fewer days I'd wasted not on syntax. Well, I've wasted it now, but I hadn't yet this morning. (4 Comments | Comment on this)
10:30p	It seems that is entangledbank baffled There are things in my notes I've never seen before; or trauma has blotted them from my memory. DP subjects of adjective predicates start as Spec,AP to get their θ-role assigned? I mean, it makes perfect sense, don't get me wrong, I'm admiring the lapidary clarity of it; it's just I've never seen this stuff in my handwriting before. 'then must move to Spec-IP to get its case features checked'... hm, okay. My notes actually say 'deleted', crossed out, replaced by 'checked'. Wait a minute, I understand that, I just read it a few pages ago... DP φ-features are interpretable but V agreement ones aren't, so FI says they... yuh, yuh, okay got that. Next. '-- This illustrates answer to "Demonstrate that expletive it has φ-features but expletive there has none."' It does? mutters... 'There' doesn't control agreement... In addition to φD features DPs have Case features... ECM objects move out of a lower IP into Spec,AgrO of higher IP... What's scary is I understand about 90% of it once I uncurl from the foetal ball and peek at it. 'Cept this bit: 'This takes place regardless of adjacency effects of adjuncts... -- but these are ungrammatical!' Current Mood: gloomy (1 Comment | Comment on this)
11:57p	eggcorn: a hand few Just noticed someone on E2 writing 'hand few' in the sense of 'handful'; Google is not useful on that two-word phrase (mainly of the type 'on the other hand, few people...'), but restricting it to 'a hand few' gives 169 hits, almost all of which are the eggcorn. Restricting it to UK sites gets only 6 hits, so it's not (just) the SE accents bringing the words closer. By the way, there seems to be a little discrepancy in what an eggcorn actually is. The very first time it was introduced it was a one-off thing, a mistake one person made by mishearing or misunderstanding, and not widespread enough to count as folk etymology. But pretty soon Mark Liberman is using it for 'sporadic' uses such as 'reigns of power', which is clearly widespread and semantically motivated enough so to count. Postscript: ML answers on eggcorn terminology. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2004/04/08 [Calendar]

Next Day >>