Re: ADJ (of) a -- where's the plural?

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, April 16, 2004 11:22 pm -0400 Steve Boatti <Ittaob at AOL.COM>
wrote:


> In a message dated 4/16/04 9:28:53 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>> Actually, you can *say* "They're [tu:] good shooters", but only for
>> "two", not "too".
>>
>
> Perhaps someone can explain to me, a non-linguist, just why you can't say
> "they're too good shooters." It is perfectly grammatical and doesn't sound
> strange to me at all.

It's the sort of thing that one should probably check out in a corpus
before claiming it can't happen, but if I heard this sentence, I'd
definitely interpret the [tu:] as 'two'.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics

Department of Linguistics and English Language
Arts B133
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QN
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