[Ads-l] Is this easier to parse for others than it is for me?

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Sun Aug 12 01:11:38 UTC 2018


>  Has everyone been saying this sort of thing all along and I haven’t
noticed?

No.

Another SOTA, IMO.

JL

On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 8:28 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Tonight on NBC Nightly News, anchor Kate Snow summarized an incident in
> which an entire parking lot suddenly collapsed into a sinkhole.  One woman
> had been sitting in her car when it happened, but Snow reassured viewers:
> “Luckily, she and no one else was injured”
>
> It’s clear what was intended:  Luckily, neither she nor anyone else was
> injured.  But I couldn’t say it the way Kate Snow did, with the negation in
> “no one else” extending over the “she” in the first conjunct, and I can’t
> remember if I’ve heard it before.  I trolled the web for similar examples,
> and sure enough I found a few almost identical ones.  Note that the
> presence of “luckily”, “fortunately”, or “thankfully” blocks the
> compositional interpretation (as in “she and no else was responsible” = she
> was, nobody else was) that is much more widely attested.
>
> Queen Latifah was the victim of a carjacking in Atlanta, but thankfully
> she and no one else was injured during the robbery.
>
> http://www.justjared.com/2016/12/28/video-queen-latifah-falls-victim-to-carjacking-in-atlanta/
>
> [re kart-racer Ashley Rugero]
> Her trip to the Kartodromo Internacional Lucas Guerrero outside Valencia,
> Spain over November 25-29 for the 15th edition of the RMCGF did not go as
> planned. Her laptimes were right there during practice but slipped in
> qualifying…A wreck in heat one was marred by an exploding brake rotor in
> heat two. Thankfully, she and no one else was hurt.
>
> https://ekartingnews.com/2014/12/03/ekartingnews-com-driver-of-the-month-october-2014-ashley-rogero/
>
> My husband is epileptic and Keppra was a med he used to take. He had two
> major emotional fallouts. One time he got into an argument with a friend of
> his and he got in his car and stormed off. Ended up totalling his car.
> Luckily he (and no one else was hurt).
>
> https://www.healthboards.com/boards/epilepsy/754506-can-keppra-alter-personalty.html
> (I know, weird parentheses, but no doubt the least of her problems.)
>
> Has everyone been saying this sort of thing all along and I haven’t
> noticed?
>
> LH
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
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