on the blend slip watch

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:30 AM -0700 7/15/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Jul 15, 2004, at 10:14 AM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>
>>At 8:44 AM -0700 7/15/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
>>>He'll have a lot of more competition.
>>>
>>>[presumably: a lot more competition + a lot of competition]
>>
>>Thanks, Arnold, for this example. I suppose the two blending elements
>>are
>>"a lot more competition" and "a lot of additional [or: extra]
>>competition"
>
>that's what i intended to type.  though what i did type is not entirely
>out of the question.
>
>arnold

actually I find "a lot of competition", as in Arnold's original post,
to be a far more natural blendee here than the other ("extra" or
"additional") options.  "They won't offer {much/a lot of}
competition" is a standard collocation, while "a lot of
{extra/additional} competition" doesn't seem that likely.  This is
borne out via google, which yields just 2 and 1 hits respectively for
these, compared with 35,200 for "a lot of competition" tout court.
In fact, even "(There is) a lot of more competition" itself,
ill-formed as it is, has as many hits (1) as "a lot of additional
competition".

larry