dookie

[Laurence Horn]

>At 2:04 PM -0500 9/23/04, Mullins, Bill wrote:
>>  > -----Original Message-----
>>>  From: Arnold M. Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU]
>>>  Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 1:45 PM
>>>  To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>>  Subject: Re: dookie
>>>
>>>    but HDAS glosses it as
>>  > 'excrement', which suggests a mass use (like the most common
>>>  uses of "shit") as well.  is this possible? things like,
>>>  "gross, there's dookie all over the floor"?
>>
>>"Shit" can be a count noun, too.  "Take a shit" for example.
>>(although "leave a shit" would, strictly speaking, be more accurate)
>[and this was me--LH:]
>As your last observation indicates, _shit_ isn't *really* a count
>noun in _take a shit_, or a referential noun at all, but part of a
>"light verb" construction.

Oops.  I realize I should have defined this term of art.  The point
is that "to take a piss/shit/shower" is essentially just a different
way of saying "to piss/shit/shower"; the verb "take" doesn't
contribute compositionally to the meaning, and the nouns are, as I
was trying to argue in the last message, essentially place-holders,
not real, honest-to-goodness God-fearing referential nominal
expressions, which is why relative clauses are ruled more or less
out.  Haj Ross talked about these in his dissertation under the
rubric of "modalization", which I recall was a term he borrowed from
Zelllig Harris, and I'm sure Jespersen had a detailed discussion of
them somewhere too.

larry