changing antonyms

[Dennis R. Preston]

I am afraid both of these examples involve imagined pragmatic contexts for
these items, and alternative ones (see below) would reverse the good-bad
opposition, making them examples of "grammatical-semantic" variation rather
than lexical ones.

"Don't hand me any more of the shit you usually deal out around here." (the
shit = not good.)

"Got any more shit, man. The last stuff you sold me was killer." (shit - good)

dInIs



>On Wed, 24 May 2000, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
>> I don't know if this will help or not, but "a bomb" is something that went
>> badly and "the bomb" is something that's hella good.
>
>Ditto with something being "the shit" (really good) and "shit" (really
>bad).
>
>-- Steve


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736