Fed up (of)

[Beverly Flanigan]

I just heard a reporter on NPR say so-and-so are "concerned of" something
(in a report on Iraq).  Again, it sounds like the use of a default
preposition instead of "with" or "about."

At 08:23 AM 12/22/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>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)