What's in a word?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:19 AM -0400 4/21/01, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>There's a difference between "I'm sorry that you got drunk and rammed your
>car through your garage door" and "I'm sorry that I got drunk and rammed my
>car through your garage door".

And even more dramatically, between "We're sorry that the pilot died"
(an expression of sadness and compassion) and "We're sorry for
killing the pilot".  Or even between "I'm sorry that I got drunk" and
"I'm sorry for getting drunk"; the latter is much more likely to be
intended and interpreted as an (indirect) apology, the former a
straight expression of emotional reaction.  In one of the articles I
read, what the U.S. said was something like "We're sorry for the
death of the pilot", which uses the "for" of apology but follows it
with a noun phrase rather than a clause, so there's no responsibility
presupposed the way there would be in the "sorry for getting drunk"
case.

larry