"for" or "of"

[Dave Hause]

Thanks for the elaboration.  I know what a default is but was unaware of
such in this situation and I should have figured out what a nominalized verb
is (vis. Dave Barry's "any verb can be nouned") but hadn't heard the formal
term.

I think one of the other correspondents claimed/mentioned a rough equivalent
in the mdical community and that is my sense of MY community.  I look at the
two forms and either seems natural.
Dave Hause, dwhause at jobe.net
Ft. Leonard Wood, MO
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>

"A nominalized verb" means a noun that is derived from a verb and refers to
the same action as the verb does:
hatred : hate
love : love
analysis : analyze
dictation : dictate

So much for the terminology, I hope; what's left of it should be made clear
by the following. Now for the reasoning.

She hates bigotry.
Her hatred of bigotry sends her to demonstrations all over the country.

I love chocolate.
My love of chocolate costs me $20 a week.

You say you have analyzed this sample of river water.
But your results are identical with your analysis of chocolate milk.

Sometimes the object of a nominalized verb can be or is expressed with a
different preposition than "of": "my love for you". But that depends on the
verb and even the context: ?"my love for chocolate" sound strange, at least
to me, and I think to most native American English speakers. In the absence
of such particular circumstances, "of" is used; that's what "default" means
in programming and in other contexts referring to rules and generalizations.

If in fact they are roughly equal in usage in the medical community -- a
statistic as to which, as I said, I have no information -- that would be a
fact about this technical dialect. The reason for it would be a subject of
further investigation.