FUNKNET Digest, Vol 95, Issue 2

[s.t. bischoff]

What about the following...I've been curious about these types of sets but
have never looked into them...surely some clever analysis out there
somewhere...

(1) The kids have been bike riding all day/The kids have been riding (their)
bikes all day.

(2) He's out job-hunting/He's out hunting for a job.

(3) Wolfie loves to go kite-flying/Wolfie loves to go fly kites.

(4) She started horseback riding when she was 8/She started riding horses at
8. (here "riding horses" could refer to "English riding" and  "horseback"
might be construed as "Western"...but where I come from that wouldn't be the
case...folks only ride one way)

cheers,
Shannon

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 1:00 PM, <funknet-request at mailman.rice.edu> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. difference in form without difference in meaning
>      (Frederick J Newmeyer)
>   2. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning
>      (Daniel Everett)
>   3. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning (Tom Givon)
>   4. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning
>      (Angus Grieve-Smith)
>   5. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning (jess tauber)
>   6. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning
>      (Victor K. Golla)
>   7. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning (Tom Givon)
>   8.  References (Sylvester OSU)
>   9. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning
>      (john at research.haifa.ac.il)
>  10. Re: difference in form without difference in meaning (Tom Givon)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 14:17:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at u.washington.edu>
> Subject: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in meaning
> To: Funknet <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID:
>        <alpine.LRH.2.01.1108041417270.26399 at hymn33.u.washington.edu>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>
> Dear Funknetters,
>
> I am looking for convincing examples of where two syntactically-related
> sentence-types manifest clearly identical meanings, where 'meaning' is taken
> in its broadest sense, including discourse-pragmatic aspects. Another way of
> putting it is to say that I am looking for two sentence types that in early
> TG would have been related by 'optional rules', but which absolutely do not
> differ in meaning. It's not so easy to come up with good examples, once
> differences in topicality and focus are allowed as meaning differences. One
> possible example that comes to mind are sentences with or without
> complementizer-deletion, such as 'I knew that he'd be on time', vs. 'I knew
> he'd be on time'. But even here there have been argued to be meaning
> differences.
>
> One possibility that has been suggested to me is from Early Modern English,
> when many speakers could say both 'Saw you the bird?' and 'Did you see the
> bird?' Does anybody have evidence that there were subtle meaning differences
> here?
>
> I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with meaning
> differences. But I have become less skeptical recently.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --fritz
>
> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
> University
> [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 17:41:02 -0400
> From: Daniel Everett <dan at daneverett.org>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at u.washington.edu>
> Cc: Funknet <FUNKNET at mailman.rice.edu>
> Message-ID: <02BDE2FA-F961-4A4B-87F4-188EF72D9FF2 at daneverett.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
> The phonological equivalent of this would be free variation.
>
> Not sure that exists either.
>
> Dan
>
>
> On Aug 4, 2011, at 5:17 PM, Frederick J Newmeyer wrote:
>
> > Dear Funknetters,
> >
> > I am looking for convincing examples of where two syntactically-related
> sentence-types manifest clearly identical meanings, where 'meaning' is taken
> in its broadest sense, including discourse-pragmatic aspects. Another way of
> putting it is to say that I am looking for two sentence types that in early
> TG would have been related by 'optional rules', but which absolutely do not
> differ in meaning. It's not so easy to come up with good examples, once
> differences in topicality and focus are allowed as meaning differences. One
> possible example that comes to mind are sentences with or without
> complementizer-deletion, such as 'I knew that he'd be on time', vs. 'I knew
> he'd be on time'. But even here there have been argued to be meaning
> differences.
> >
> > One possibility that has been suggested to me is from Early Modern
> English, when many speakers could say both 'Saw you the bird?' and 'Did you
> see the bird?' Does anybody have evidence that there were subtle meaning
> differences here?
> >
> > I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with meaning
> differences. But I have become less skeptical recently.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --fritz
> >
> > Frederick J. Newmeyer
> > Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> > Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
> University
> > [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:29:53 -0600
> From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4E3B1D61.1000807 at uoregon.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>
> Many if not all examples of on-going grammatical change are like that,
> Fritz (as is the English ex. you cited). And therefore the phenomenon
> must be massive--because you can find MANY constructions in the grammar
> that are are RIGHT NOW/THEN in the midst of change. At that point, some
> people would call this "free variation". Out of which there are two
> major venues: (a)  the old firms will obsolesce; (b) the two forms will
> diverge in meaning. I've also seen people trying to describe this
> presumably-transitory stage as "a conservative dialect vs. a progressive
> dialect". But as I go now over my Ute texts, I find numerous examples
> where the same (old) speaker, in the same text, uses either the more
> conservative form or the more progressive one without batting an
> eyelash, sometime in consecutive sentences that repeat the very same
> material. So, cognitively, we've got to assume that during this
> (presumably transitory)stage, speakers know both forms, and know that
> they have the same semantic & pragmatic value.
>
> Now, is this stage really all that transitory? Tony Naro has noted that
> such "coexisting forms" can go for a long time, with the dominant old
> form comprising 90% of the text-instances and the innovative form(s)
> 5-10%. Then at a certain point there is a very rapid shift in
> frequencies. This gives you an "S-shaped learning curve", much like in
> the psychology of learning. Most of us who observed this curve don't
> know what triggers the beginning of the rapid change.  TG
>
> ==============
>
> On 8/4/2011 3:17 PM, Frederick J Newmeyer wrote:
> > Dear Funknetters,
> >
> > I am looking for convincing examples of where two syntactically-related
> sentence-types manifest clearly identical meanings, where 'meaning' is taken
> in its broadest sense, including discourse-pragmatic aspects. Another way of
> putting it is to say that I am looking for two sentence types that in early
> TG would have been related by 'optional rules', but which absolutely do not
> differ in meaning. It's not so easy to come up with good examples, once
> differences in topicality and focus are allowed as meaning differences. One
> possible example that comes to mind are sentences with or without
> complementizer-deletion, such as 'I knew that he'd be on time', vs. 'I knew
> he'd be on time'. But even here there have been argued to be meaning
> differences.
> >
> > One possibility that has been suggested to me is from Early Modern
> English, when many speakers could say both 'Saw you the bird?' and 'Did you
> see the bird?' Does anybody have evidence that there were subtle meaning
> differences here?
> >
> > I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with meaning
> differences. But I have become less skeptical recently.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --fritz
> >
> > Frederick J. Newmeyer
> > Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> > Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
> University
> > [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
> >
> >
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:15:58 -0400
> From: Angus Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4E3B363E.4060301 at panix.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> On 8/4/2011 6:29 PM, Tom Givon wrote:
> >
> >
> > Many if not all examples of on-going grammatical change are like that,
> > Fritz (as is the English ex. you cited). And therefore the phenomenon
> > must be massive--because you can find MANY constructions in the
> > grammar that are are RIGHT NOW/THEN in the midst of change. At that
> > point, some people would call this "free variation". Out of which
> > there are two major venues: (a)  the old firms will obsolesce; (b) the
> > two forms will diverge in meaning. I've also seen people trying to
> > describe this presumably-transitory stage as "a conservative dialect
> > vs. a progressive dialect".
>
>     Yes, Bill Croft discusses these three possibilities in his 2000
> book, but he describes the third possibility more generally (page 177):
>
> "Speakers will divide the community or set of communities and associate
> the distinct forms with distinct communities.  For example, I heard a
> historical linguist suggest that /grammaticalization /tends to be used
> by European-trained historical linguists and their students, while
> /grammaticization/ tends to be used by American-trained historical
> linguists and their students."
>
> > Now, is this stage really all that transitory? Tony Naro has noted
> > that such "coexisting forms" can go for a long time, with the dominant
> > old form comprising 90% of the text-instances and the innovative
> > form(s) 5-10%. Then at a certain point there is a very rapid shift in
> > frequencies. This gives you an "S-shaped learning curve", much like in
> > the psychology of learning. Most of us who observed this curve don't
> > know what triggers the beginning of the rapid change.  TG
>
>     I'm skeptical that the coexisting forms have the same meaning
> during that entire time.  In my theatrical data on French negation,
> before 1600 /ne ... pas/ is used to negate sentences between 10-20% of
> the time, but almost never in contexts where it unambiguously represents
> predicate negation.  Instead, it is used to deny a presupposition, while
> /ne/ alone is used for predicate negation.
>
>     Once /ne ... pas/ starts being used for predicate negation, it
> seems to be considered "the same" as /ne/ alone.  That is also the time
> when the S-curve starts (what Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968 call
> "actuation").  I discuss this in greater detail in my dissertation:
>
> http://hdl.handle.net/1928/9808
>
> --
>                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
>                                Saint John's University
>                                grvsmth at panix.com
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 00:07:25 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
> From: jess tauber <phonosemantics at earthlink.net>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <
> 15617119.1312517246312.JavaMail.root at wamui-junio.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hi folks. I'll admit at the outset that this isn't my area, but just on the
> face of it, to my sensibilities, the difference between 'Saw you the bird?'
> and 'Did you see the bird?' is one of directness and/or formality. The first
> seems to me more intimate, informal, less 'accusing' usage, at least for my
> modern English. Maybe easier to see with 'See (you) the bird?' vs. 'Do you
> see the bird?'. With 'do' the question seems (at least potentially) as much
> about the bird as my ability/willingness to see it, while without it perhaps
> its more about the speaker's needs. I know that in many instances pronominal
> paradigms have been reshaped to reflect unwillingness to appear
> confrontational in conversation. It would be interesting here from the
> typological perspective to know whether there is any linkage between
> constructional switching and the degree to and direction in which discourse
> has to be negotiated. More formality structurewise= more formality
> interrelationally? Languages with
>  the least morphology more context sensitive and all that rubbish.
>
> Jess Tauber
> goldenratio at earthlink.net
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 21:22:31 -0700
> From: "Victor K. Golla" <Victor.Golla at humboldt.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at u.washington.edu>,
>        funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID:
>        <CAKxvog709RyMzihs6xwzT4e6=50imWp6yM30E6mh8t7j5rY6FA at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Fritz--
>
> > I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> > differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with
> > meaning differences. But I have become less skeptical recently
>
> I think Bolinger was merely paraphrasing Bloomfield, according to whom
> the "fundamental assumption of linguistics" (i.e., "In certain
> communities some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning")
>
>          implies that each linguistic form has a constant and specific
>          meaning.  If the ... forms are different, we suppose that their
>          meanings also are different....We suppose, in short, that there
>          are no actual synonyms (Language, 1933, 144-45).
>
> Bloomfield, however, was at pains to confine this "somewhat rigid
> analysis of speech-forms" to "the descriptive phase of linguistics" in
> which pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and diachronic variation is
> purposely ignored. But "when we deal with the historical change of
> language, we shall be concerned with facts for which our assumption
> does not hold good" (ibid, 158).
>
> --Victor Golla
>
> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Frederick J Newmeyer
> <fjn at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> > Dear Funknetters,
> >
> > I am looking for convincing examples of where two syntactically-related
> sentence-types manifest clearly identical meanings, where 'meaning' is taken
> in its broadest sense, including discourse-pragmatic aspects. Another way of
> putting it is to say that I am looking for two sentence types that in early
> TG would have been related by 'optional rules', but which absolutely do not
> differ in meaning. It's not so easy to come up with good examples, once
> differences in topicality and focus are allowed as meaning differences. One
> possible example that comes to mind are sentences with or without
> complementizer-deletion, such as 'I knew that he'd be on time', vs. 'I knew
> he'd be on time'. But even here there have been argued to be meaning
> differences.
> >
> > One possibility that has been suggested to me is from Early Modern
> English, when many speakers could say both 'Saw you the bird?' and 'Did you
> see the bird?' Does anybody have evidence that there were subtle meaning
> differences here?
> >
> > I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with meaning
> differences. But I have become less skeptical recently.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > --fritz
> >
> > Frederick J. Newmeyer
> > Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> > Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
> University
> > [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:15:57 -0600
> From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4E3B7C8D.9080609 at uoregon.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
>
> Right on, Vic. The old fox was not stupid, he just needed to idealize
> synchrony by segregating it from diachrony. Standard Saussurean
> position. Or Chomskian.  TG
>
>
> ================
> On 8/4/2011 10:22 PM, Victor K. Golla wrote:
> > Fritz--
> >
> >> I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> >> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with
> >> meaning differences. But I have become less skeptical recently
> > I think Bolinger was merely paraphrasing Bloomfield, according to whom
> > the "fundamental assumption of linguistics" (i.e., "In certain
> > communities some speech-utterances are alike as to form and meaning")
> >
> >            implies that each linguistic form has a constant and specific
> >            meaning.  If the ... forms are different, we suppose that
> their
> >            meanings also are different....We suppose, in short, that
> there
> >            are no actual synonyms (Language, 1933, 144-45).
> >
> > Bloomfield, however, was at pains to confine this "somewhat rigid
> > analysis of speech-forms" to "the descriptive phase of linguistics" in
> > which pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and diachronic variation is
> > purposely ignored. But "when we deal with the historical change of
> > language, we shall be concerned with facts for which our assumption
> > does not hold good" (ibid, 158).
> >
> > --Victor Golla
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Frederick J Newmeyer
> > <fjn at u.washington.edu>  wrote:
> >> Dear Funknetters,
> >>
> >> I am looking for convincing examples of where two syntactically-related
> sentence-types manifest clearly identical meanings, where 'meaning' is taken
> in its broadest sense, including discourse-pragmatic aspects. Another way of
> putting it is to say that I am looking for two sentence types that in early
> TG would have been related by 'optional rules', but which absolutely do not
> differ in meaning. It's not so easy to come up with good examples, once
> differences in topicality and focus are allowed as meaning differences. One
> possible example that comes to mind are sentences with or without
> complementizer-deletion, such as 'I knew that he'd be on time', vs. 'I knew
> he'd be on time'. But even here there have been argued to be meaning
> differences.
> >>
> >> One possibility that has been suggested to me is from Early Modern
> English, when many speakers could say both 'Saw you the bird?' and 'Did you
> see the bird?' Does anybody have evidence that there were subtle meaning
> differences here?
> >>
> >> I had always been quite skeptical of Dwight Bolinger's idea that
> differences in (lexical and syntactic) form always correlate with meaning
> differences. But I have become less skeptical recently.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> --fritz
> >>
> >> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> >> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> >> Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser
> University
> >> [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]
> >>
> >>
> >>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 08:59:45 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Sylvester OSU <sylvester.osu at wanadoo.fr>
> Subject: [FUNKNET]  References
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <18476851.7574.1312527586070.JavaMail.www at wwinf2218>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Dear Funknetters,
>
> I will soon be teaching a course on language and its relationship to
> reality and will like to have some relevant references on this topic. Kindly
> please send such to:
>
> sylvester.osu at wanadoo.fr
>
> Thanking you in advance.
>
> Sylvester
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Fri,  5 Aug 2011 11:25:55 +0300
> From: john at research.haifa.ac.il
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: jess tauber <phonosemantics at earthlink.net>
> Cc: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <1312532755.4e3ba913d71d2 at webmail.haifa.ac.il>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1255
>
> A long time ago (early 1980s), together with Tony Kroch and Susan Pintzuk I
> did
> a study of how 'do' came to be used as a question marker, a change which
> was
> was for the most part started and completed in the course of the 16th
> century.
> DURING the 16th century, there was a lot of variation between the older
> VS question and the newer do-construction, the most significant factor
> being
> whether the subject was a pronoun or noun, whether there was a direct
> object,
> and if so, whether the direct object was a noun or pronoun. There was also
> a
> clear tendency for the do-construction to become more common as the century
> went on. But there was also an effect of the semantic type of the verb,
> with
> the do-construction being associated with active verbs and the VS
> construction
> associated with stative verbs. It was very difficult to say anything
> concrete
> about this, because the variation was affected by so many non-semantic
> factors,
> but in some sense at the time, to the extent that any difference in meaning
> could be suggested, 'Did you see the bird?' would have implied that the
> subject
> took some action to intentionally see the bird (like going to a place where
> the
> bird was), whereas 'Saw you the bird?' would imply that the bird passed in
> front of the subject's field of vision. It's difficult to get a parallel
> difference in meaning in the present tense. Additionally, there was at the
> time
> a strong tendency to use 'ye' as a clitic-like subject form, so that in
> general
> 'See you the bird?' would have been disfavored because in involved a
> non-clitic
> subject form intervening between the verb and the object. 'Saw ye the
> bird?'
> would have been much more normal. And the semantic alternation would have
> been
> clearest in the middle of the change, whereas earlier and later than this,
> stylistic factors were more important--I would guess that there were no
> more
> than two generations when there was something like a productive
> semantically-based alternation.
> John
>
>
>
> Quoting jess tauber <phonosemantics at earthlink.net>:
>
> > Hi folks. I'll admit at the outset that this isn't my area, but just on
> the
> > face of it, to my sensibilities, the difference between 'Saw you the
> bird?'
> > and 'Did you see the bird?' is one of directness and/or formality. The
> first
> > seems to me more intimate, informal, less 'accusing' usage, at least for
> my
> > modern English. Maybe easier to see with 'See (you) the bird?' vs. 'Do
> you
> > see the bird?'. With 'do' the question seems (at least potentially) as
> much
> > about the bird as my ability/willingness to see it, while without it
> perhaps
> > its more about the speaker's needs. I know that in many instances
> pronominal
> > paradigms have been reshaped to reflect unwillingness to appear
> > confrontational in conversation. It would be interesting here from the
> > typological perspective to know whether there is any linkage between
> > constructional switching and the degree to and direction in which
> discourse
> > has to be negotiated. More formality structurewise= more formality
> > interrelationally? Languages with the least morphology more context
> sensitive
> > and all that rubbish.
> >
> > Jess Tauber
> > goldenratio at earthlink.net
> >
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> This message was sent using IMP, the Webmail Program of Haifa University
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2011 10:31:57 -0600
> From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] difference in form without difference in
>        meaning
> To: funknet at mailman.rice.edu
> Message-ID: <4E3C1AFD.4030904 at uoregon.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
> John did an excellent job in showing some of the complexities involved
> in the actual process of change. One possible implication is, perhaps,
> that such complexity can be captured in neither the Generative nor
> Varb-rule perspective. The cognitive implication outstrip the
> theoretical machinery of either of these "theories".
>
> Perhaps one thing to remember concerns the time-course issue: The
> data-base for the study of 16th Cent. English is, exclusively,written
> texts. That genre tends to be, sometimes, centuries behind the actual
> changes, which took place, almost exclusively, in the spoken language.
> Often, the low-frequency variants characteristic of the slow first part
> of the S-shaped curve are completely ignored in the written language,
> which tends to go with the higher-frequency (well-established) form, and
> thus appears to be "more generative". This gives a false impression of a
> much faster curve of , i.e., the middle portion of the SW-shaped curve.
> Lynn Yang & I made this observation when studying the rise of the
> GET-passive in English. It was nigh impossible to find examples in
> 19th-century writing--till we got to sampling Huck Finn, which is
> deliberately pitched toward the colloquial. All of a sudden, seemingly
> with no gradual prep time, the frequencies jumped up. Which suggested to
> us that the mature (tho still largely adversive) GET-passive
> construction may have been lurking around for a long time prior, perhaps
> centuries, in the spoken language . Cheers,  TG
>
> ============
>
> On 8/5/2011 2:25 AM, john at research.haifa.ac.il wrote:
> > A long time ago (early 1980s), together with Tony Kroch and Susan Pintzuk
> I did
> > a study of how 'do' came to be used as a question marker, a change which
> was
> > was for the most part started and completed in the course of the 16th
> century.
> > DURING the 16th century, there was a lot of variation between the older
> > VS question and the newer do-construction, the most significant factor
> being
> > whether the subject was a pronoun or noun, whether there was a direct
> object,
> > and if so, whether the direct object was a noun or pronoun. There was
> also a
> > clear tendency for the do-construction to become more common as the
> century
> > went on. But there was also an effect of the semantic type of the verb,
> with
> > the do-construction being associated with active verbs and the VS
> construction
> > associated with stative verbs. It was very difficult to say anything
> concrete
> > about this, because the variation was affected by so many non-semantic
> factors,
> > but in some sense at the time, to the extent that any difference in
> meaning
> > could be suggested, 'Did you see the bird?' would have implied that the
> subject
> > took some action to intentionally see the bird (like going to a place
> where the
> > bird was), whereas 'Saw you the bird?' would imply that the bird passed
> in
> > front of the subject's field of vision. It's difficult to get a parallel
> > difference in meaning in the present tense. Additionally, there was at
> the time
> > a strong tendency to use 'ye' as a clitic-like subject form, so that in
> general
> > 'See you the bird?' would have been disfavored because in involved a
> non-clitic
> > subject form intervening between the verb and the object. 'Saw ye the
> bird?'
> > would have been much more normal. And the semantic alternation would have
> been
> > clearest in the middle of the change, whereas earlier and later than
> this,
> > stylistic factors were more important--I would guess that there were no
> more
> > than two generations when there was something like a productive
> > semantically-based alternation.
> > John
> >
> >
> >
> > Quoting jess tauber<phonosemantics at earthlink.net>:
> >
> >> Hi folks. I'll admit at the outset that this isn't my area, but just on
> the
> >> face of it, to my sensibilities, the difference between 'Saw you the
> bird?'
> >> and 'Did you see the bird?' is one of directness and/or formality. The
> first
> >> seems to me more intimate, informal, less 'accusing' usage, at least for
> my
> >> modern English. Maybe easier to see with 'See (you) the bird?' vs. 'Do
> you
> >> see the bird?'. With 'do' the question seems (at least potentially) as
> much
> >> about the bird as my ability/willingness to see it, while without it
> perhaps
> >> its more about the speaker's needs. I know that in many instances
> pronominal
> >> paradigms have been reshaped to reflect unwillingness to appear
> >> confrontational in conversation. It would be interesting here from the
> >> typological perspective to know whether there is any linkage between
> >> constructional switching and the degree to and direction in which
> discourse
> >> has to be negotiated. More formality structurewise= more formality
> >> interrelationally? Languages with the least morphology more context
> sensitive
> >> and all that rubbish.
> >>
> >> Jess Tauber
> >> goldenratio at earthlink.net
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
>
>
> End of FUNKNET Digest, Vol 95, Issue 2
> **************************************
>