'Nother blend (or, telling on myself)

[Dennis R. Preston]

This does not strike me as a parallel difficulty at all:

I've got more than one day's of clean clothes.

is like

I've got more than two days' of clean clothes

but very different from

I've got more than two days of clean clothes

which is like

I've got more than one day of clean clothes.

And neither of these latter two strike me as odd (We had more than
one day/two days of good weather).

dInIs





>With all the discussion lately about syntactic blends, i suppose it was only
>a matter of time before i caught myself in one. So, in the interest of
>adding to people's collections, here it is:
>
>This morning, Jeanne (my wife) and i were discussing how urgent our laundry
>situation was. In saying that, at least for my clothes, it wasn't at an
>*absolutely* critical point, i said:
>
>      I've got more than one day's of clean clothes.
>
>As i said it, i realized that i'd been trying to say both "...one day's
>worth of clean..." and "...one day's clean...", but i managed to say
>neither.
>
>The interesting thing about this is that if i'd said "I've got more than two
>days' of clean clothes" (also true, FWIW), i'd've been making the same blend
>error, but it would have been completely transparent to the hearer.
>
>Of course, as it was, Jeanne didn't blink an eye at it, making me wonder if
>she even perceived it as a speech error (i didn't think to ask)--or maybe
>she's just used to hearing me use weird syntax, since i am after all a
>linguist.
>
>But it made me wonder if "of" has some sort of weird property in these,
>since lots of the blands that have been reported here seem to be built
>around that word. Could it be that these aren't errors as much as some sort
>of syntactic change, heralded by the commonly reported writing error "I
>would of done that", reanalyzed from "I would've done that"? Maybe some of
>these--note: I'm not claiming *all* of these--aren't actually errors at all.
>
>David Bowie                                         http://pmpkn.net/lx
>     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
>     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
>     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
        Asian and African Languages
Wells Hall A-740
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office: (517) 353-0740
Fax: (517) 432-2736