Different as determinative

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Nov 20, 2011, at 5:11 PM, Randy Alexander wrote:

> On the excellent blog English, Jack, Brett Reynolds captures his mother
> saying, "Different of the people commented that Marg could be unpleasant."
>
> http://english-jack.blogspot.com/2011/11/different-of-people.html
>
> Is this grammatical for anyone here, or has anyone heard similar?  (It's
> ungrammatical for me, and the way Brett presents it, I take it that it's
> ungrammatical for him too.)

see the discussion of "various of" here:

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/various-of/

"different of" would be right in line with this "pronominal" use of "various", but it doesn't seem to have attracted the attention of the manuals.

quick searches of "different of the people" don't net much, though there are occurrences of it as an alternative to "different from/to/than" (i'm not sure how many from native speakers).

arnold

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