Fed up

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Dec 21, 2003, at 4:19 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:

> ["fed up of"] looks like a blend: "fed up with" and "sick of"

similar to "bored of" ("bored with" x "tired of").

like gerald cohen, i'm interested in syntactic blends and have been
collecting them for years.  *but* these particular cases could have a
non-blend explanation, namely that instead of selecting some specific
and unpredictable object-marking preposition (in these two cases,
"with"), the adjective is reverting to the default, all-purpose
preposition of english, that is, "of".  if so, what speakers who
initiate the shift of prepositions are doing is not blending but
simplifying the lexicon.

in principle, it would be possible to assemble evidence again each of
these proposals (blending, defaulting).  (a) if we found adjectives
that shifted from a marked preposition to "of" for which there was no
semantically appropriate analogue with "of" -- admittedly, not an easy
thing to find -- then we'd have evidence against the blending proposal.
  (b) and if we found adjectives that shifted from one marked
preposition to a different marked preposition (rather than to the
unmarked preposition "of"), then we'd have evidence against the
defaulting proposal.

still, these arguments would be very weak.  i believe that blending and
defaulting are *both* genuine mechanisms of change, with relatively
clear attested examples.  so maybe there's no way to tell, *in any
particular case*, which mechanism is at work; in fact, different
speakers who show the same shift might have different -- or even mixed
-- motivations for doing so.  (just to be clear, let me remind
everyone, again, that most speakers with an innovative form are not
themselves the innovators, but merely the vehicles of the form's
spread, so that it makes no sense to ask after the grammatical
rationale for their usage.  they're just repeating what they hear.)

a further complexity comes from the fact that the selection of
object-marking prepositions is not a simple matter of regularity ("of")
vs. idiosyncrasy (a marked preposition), since classes of adjectives
(or verbs or nouns) can select prepositions on the basis of their
semantics; there surely are semantically based subregularities in these
selections, and these would have to be excluded if an argument of type
(b) is to put forward.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)