- ([info]entangledbank) wrote,
@ 2004-08-02 20:56:00
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Current mood: complacent
Current music:Esa-Pekka Salonen, Laughing Unlearnt

You've been a very naughty boy
Erm, yes. So I found something linguistically interesting. A sentence along the lines 'he was laughing at Harry's parents' wedding', and you see that's interesting cos English has two verbs, 'laugh' and 'laugh at', and the plain one can take a locative adjunct 'at the wedding' while the phrasal one can take a direct object 'the wedding'; and what's really interesting is if the context is not knowing whether Sirius is a traitor or loyal, it can be interpreted as either. So finishing that book counts towards doing my dissertation, which, if my creaky alcohol-addled memory serves me correctly, is on linguistics.

Look, there's six weeks till I have to hand the effing thing in. Easy. I'll just make up some more completely mad rubbish about axons and dendrites and graph theory and use a Time-Turner to make up for how much time I spend rereading the next two books instead of writing the, um, whatever it is I'm meant to be doing.

Piece. Of. Cake.


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[info]firynze
2004-08-02 01:20 pm UTC (link)
I quite like the way you think.

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[info]ex_mijra932
2004-08-02 02:47 pm UTC (link)
Heh. Well, at least you're in the right field if this is what you get from Harry Potter. Goodness. You sound like me, only worse. It's refreshing.

Good luck, of course. You'll manage, and it'll work somehow. Do you mean to say that there's a portion of linguistics that isn't mad rubbish in the first place?

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[info]zebra
2004-08-02 03:26 pm UTC (link)
Hi. I'm half-stalking you from [info]linguaphiles. Hope you don't mind. Here's a phrasal verb puzzle that'll roast your noodle.

Identify the parts of the following sentence:

She talked him into starting a business.


Which is the DO of the sentence? "Him"? "A business"? Which is the IO? "Talk into" clearly means something different than "talk," but how does the prepositional part of the phrasal verb work? It appears to take an object separate from that of the verb, but is that really what's going on?

I wound up doing a small research project on multipart phrasal verbs over this particulat sentence. and to this day it still drives me crazy and I'm not satisfied with the answers. It makes me think that the idea of assigning DOs and IOs in sentences might not be an entirely accurate model of what really happens, but I'm not sure I can work out a better model for it.

Anyway, your comments in linguaphiles really piqued my interest -- I'd love to hear what you can do with this. ;)

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[info]entangledbank
2004-08-03 12:49 am UTC (link)
Hi. Hm. Well first, as I use the term, though I don't know whether this is standard terminology, a ditransitive verb has two DOs: she gave him a banana.

Second, I'm not sure about phrasal verbs but I have decided they can take DOs, as above. What started me on this was 'fit in'. We have a verb 'fit' (It fits in the box; It will fit in) and another intransitive verb 'fit in': you can't *fit in the crowd, you have to say you fit in with the crowd. Then 'laugh'/'laugh at' gave me a transitive one: I don't think 'at' is the object marker, I think it's part of the verb.

Then I noticed 'put up with'. Not only does it have two particles, but the DO is obligatory, and it's unrelated to 'put up'.

And I started seeing how many different patterns there are. 'Talk s-o into s-th' is another one. If the phrasal particle is idiomatic we might say it's a verb with two DOs but not ditransitive. But I'm not sure about that: consider 'talk out of', 'talk through'. Also 'talk s-o over' (convince) with only one object. These are equally idiomatic, but we have a small paradigm of prepositional phrases, with (within the paradigm) predictable meanings.

I'm a fan of Peter Culicover, whose idea is that there just are all these peculiar constructions and you can't go fitting them all into big basic patterns. We learn idioms and irregularities at every level of syntax just as we learn the lexicon.

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[info]isolt
2004-08-02 08:20 pm UTC (link)
Yeesh. I had enough trouble finishing my thesis (and finished it at the latest date humanly possible).

Dissertations sound awful.

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