disappearing prepositions

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:54 PM -0400 9/28/04, Baker, John wrote:
>         Oh, "absent" does mean the same as "in the absence of."  It
>just takes three less words to say it.
>
>         It isn't the same as "without," of course.  That would be
>like comparing tangerines and mandarin oranges.
>

So it seems from the Kaplan cite.  As for how we got along without
it--same way we did without "hopefully" before that was adopted as an
alternative to "it is to be hoped that".  Expanding on John Baker's
observation above, there is always a tradeoff in what Martinet called
paradigmatic economy (limiting the number of items in the inventory,
e.g. the lexicon) and syntagmatic economy (limiting the length of the
articulatory production, e.g. the sentence), and it gets resolved in
different ways.

larry

>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
>Of Robert Wachal
>Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 9:48 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: disappearing prepositions
>
>
>If 'absent' offers something more than 'without' or 'in the absence of',
>how did we get along without it so damned long in non-legal discourse.