NYT Goofup is a syntactic blend

[Gerald Cohen]

On 3/17/02, Alice Faber wrote about the blend "many dioceses after
another" (from "many dioceses" + "one diocese after another"):
>This particular instance struck me as an uninteresting example of what
>happens when you get interrupted in the middle of editing; you've made half
>the changes from one structure to another and the phone rings.


    Uninteresting? Au contraire! I spent years collecting such
examples and then  tried to draw general linguistic conclusions from
the collected evidence; it's written up in my article "Contributions
to the Study of Blending", pp.81-94, in _Etymology and Linguistic
Principles_ , vol. 1: _Pursuit of Linguistic Insight_ (ed.: Gerald
Leonard Cohen), Rolla, Missouri: published by the editor; the volume
was favorably reviewed in _Language_ and _Journal of Indo-European
Studies_.

     Syntactic blends are of interest for producing ellipsis,
redundancy, grammatical change, and semantic change. They are
relevant for possibly challenging the Law of Least Effort, the view
that language is a code, the supposed rigorousness of distributional
rules, the view that language has structure. They are a challenge to
generative grammar. Some syntactic blends are apparently based on
three (rather than just two) underlying constructions. And some
blends may be termed "repeated blends", e.g. "time after time" +
"again and again" blended to "time and again;" then "time and again"
apparently blended with "time after time" to produce "time and time
again." How would generative grammar handle this latter construction?

     "Structure," "system" imply something static. Processes in
language (e.g. blending) put the focus on something dynamic. Blends
are a part of the dynamic synchrony of language, i.e.,in the here and
now language is dynamic. The example "many dioceses after another"
has not made it into the big time of language (the standard
language), but it is nevertheless illustrative of the vigorous
process of blending that goes on every day in speech. If viewed as a
tiny part of this huge mosaic, it is interesting the way a shiny
shell on the beach is interesting.

---Gerald Cohen