NYT Goofup is a syntactic blend

[Alice Faber]

Gerald Cohen said:
>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_.

I hope you don't think that I find syntactic blends uninteresting. Au
contraire. I just don't think this particular example was one. It seems
perfectly clear to me that someone wrote "one diocese after another" and
then, after deciding that that phrase was of an inappropriate register for
a newspaper article, intended to replace it with "many dioceses". This
would have involved three steps: (1) replacing "one" with "many", (2)
pluralizing the word "diocese", and (3) deleting the phrase "after
another". That this three-step process was interrupted in no way implies
that the resulting intermediate phrase is a syntactic blend. Of course, if
such a phrase were uttered in extemporaneous speech, it would be a blend.
It's all in the circumstances.

--
Alice Faber                                  tel. (203) 865-6163 x258
Haskins Laboratories                              fax  (203) 865-8963
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