The return of Spiderman

[Tibor Kiss]

Hi,

I am sorry for not replying earlier, but I encountered problems to send
messages to HPSG-L from my home system in the past and had to contact Rob
first (thanks Rob).

So, as for the famous quote 'X told Y told me', I am not absolutely certain
whether it was mom, mam, or mother, but it's from Spider-Man, the movie,
Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker, aka Spiderman) uttering it to his love interest
Kirsten Dunst (MC). One solution would be that movie producers do care and
hence have asked a linguist to devise a queer statement to make Peter Parker
more freaky, resulting in the infamous line. But I don't believe that,
because isn't such a degree of subtlety unlikely in Hollywood? Also, I think
that I've heard this before.

But perhaps you know more about linguists being involved in movie
productions (ok, I know Vulcan and Klingon, so spare me ...).

So then, if this is English, and some of you are English speakers, what
about your intuitions? Does the chain-element have to be case-neutral or
would a 'me' also be appropriate in the position of Y? Do I see this right
that at least Dick Hudson is able to judge the sentence? If yes, Dick, what
about 'Ivan told me told Carl.' (Sounds ugly to me and surely much worse
than 'Ivan told Carl told me.', but who am I to judge?)

I currently don't have the time to do a corpus search, but will do so pretty
soon, perhaps I can carve out some more instances of it. I agree btw with
John Nerbonne's conclusions about the construction. I don't agree with
Detmar. There is already an impeccable analysis of the English verbal
complex available, it's done by a guy named Noam, published in 1957. I
definitely will not excel this.

Best

T.

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Prof. Dr. Tibor Kiss -- Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum
+49-234-3225114 // +49-177-7468265 // +49-234-3214137 (fax)
What is present now will later be passed.