"swap": inversion of meaning

Dennis R. Preston preston at MSU.EDU
Fri Jan 21 14:10:15 UTC 2005


This is my favorite lurking presupposition for the new year. Course,
we got a long time to go.

"Arnold's analysis of the shift is fairly technical but may account
for what happened."

This is kind of a new twist to the economy principle, ain't it?

dInIs





>Sorry - I certainly didn't mean to imply anyone was younger than I am.
>
>The definition of to "swap" as "to trade or exchange" insufficently
>describes its historical usage. "Swapping X for Y" usually entails
>the idea that X is in my possession or under my control and Y is
>something new that isn't.
>
>"I swapped whole grains for refined ones" means to most of us just
>the opposite of what the writer clearly intended.
>
>As to the "novelty" of this newer usage - it caught my eye because
>even after hearing and reading billions and billions of words of
>English, I'd never encountered it before. This seems also to be true
>for the other posters to this thread.
>
>Arnold's analysis of the shift is fairly technical but  may account
>for what happened.
>
>JL
>
>James Smith <jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM> wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: James Smith
>Subject: Re: "swap": inversion of meaning
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Hardly young at 59, the use of "swap" to mean trade,
>exchange, or substitute seems totally natural to me.
>What is the so-called "established" meaning of swap?
>
>
>
>--- Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>>  "Blending" could account for the occasional slip of
>>  the tongue or pen, but Arnold is probably closer to
>>  explaining how such "slips" (if indeed that's how
>>  they originate) become "part of the language." In
>>  simple terms, more young (I guess) people -
>>  including young people who wind up as print
>>  journalists - have failed to comprehend a big part
>>  of the established meaning of "swap" and
>>  "substitute" (and perhaps "trade" and "switch").
>>
>>  There's enough evidence to suggest that the shift is
>>  beginning to embrace this entire category of words.
>>  JL
>>
>>  "Arnold M. Zwicky" wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail
>>  header -----------------------
>>  Sender: American Dialect Society
>>  Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>>  Subject: Re: "swap": inversion of meaning
>>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  On Jan 17, 2005, at 8:24 AM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>>
>>  > This looks like a blend: "subsitute whole grains
>>  for refined ones" +
>>  > "swap/switch refined grains for whole ones."
>>  >
>>  > In my article "Contributions To The Study of
>>  Blending" (_Etymology
>>  > And Linguistic Principles_, vol. 1---by Gerald
>>  Leonard Cohen, 1988;
>>  > self-published but very favorably
>>  reviewed---pp.81-94), I comment on
>>  > semantic change as a result of blending (p.89):
>>  > "As a result of blending, words are often thrust
>>  into a new
>>  > environment which changes the meaning of those
>>  words." (Then: two
>>  > examples; Jonathan Lighter's example below seems
>>  to be a third one,
>>  > albeit not from the standard language.).
>>  >>
>>  > Original message from Jonathan Lighter, January
>>  17, 2005:
>>  >
>>  >> This is much like the odd shift in the meaning of
>>  "substitute"
>>  >> commented upon some weeks ago:
>>  >>
>>  >> "New dietary guidelines coming out Wednesday are
>>  expected to place
>>  >> more emphasis on counting calories and exercising
>>  daily, along with
>>  >> swapping whole grains for refined ones and eating
>>  a lot more
>>  >> vegetables and fruits." -- Gov't: Calories, Not
>>  Carbs, Make You Fat
>>  >> (AP)
>>  >> January 12, 2005
>>  >>
>>  >>
>>
>http://www.intelihealth.com/IH/ihtIH/WSIHW000/333/7228/411784.html
>>  >>
>>  >> This says to me (nonsensically) that if you're
>>  eating whole grains
>>  >> now, you should switch to refined ones.
>>  >>
>>  >> Thoughts?
>>
>>  to recap the old "substitute" discussion: there are
>>  three usages:
>>  (1) original: substitute NEW for OLD
>  > (2) encroached: substitute OLD with/by NEW
>>  [an extension of the "replace" pattern]
>>  (3) reversed: substitute OLD for NEW
>>  [denison suggests that this is a blend of (1) and
>>  (2). note
>>  that both (2) and (3) have the virtue of putting OLD
>>  before NEW,
>>  iconically to the preferred sequence of old and new
>>  information]
>>
>>  now, the obvious analysis of lighter's "swap"
>>  example -- "swap NEW for
>>  OLD", instead of "swap OLD for NEW" -- is that it's
>>  an extension of
>>  the pattern in (1) to new verbs with semantics
>>  similar to "substitute"
>>  ("swap", and possibly, as cohen suggests, "switch"
>>  as well; i'd add
>>  "trade"). this extension would be facilitated by the
>>  fact that "swap",
>>  "switch", and "trade" are verbs of *mutual*
>>  substitution, for which (in
>>  central uses) NEW replaces OLD and OLD replaces NEW:
>>  in "I
>>  swapped/switched/traded my marbles for her baseball
>>  cards", the marbles
>>  replace the baseball cards and vice versa. which
>>  participant is
>>  expressed by the direct and which by the oblique
>>  object could be
>>  entirely determined by matters of focus and
>>  topicality in the
>>  discourse.
>>
>>  so lighter's example could result from an extension
>>  of a construction
>>  to new head verbs semantically similar to existing
>>  ones, a phenomenon
>>  that is very widely attested.
>>
>>  cohen's syntactic blend analysis strikes me as
>>  pretty implausible. in
>>  clear examples of syntactic blends, it's plausible
>>  to maintain that the
>>  speaker (or writer) was entertaining two competing
>>  plans for expressing
>>  the same meaning (or very similar ones) and ended up
>>  with elements of
>>  each, usually in pretty simple ways (by splicing or
>>  substitution, to
>>  use the terminology from davld fay's 1981 paper,
>>  "Substitutions and
>>  splices: A study of sentence blends"). cohen's
>>  proposal is that "swap
>>  NEW for OLD" results from blending
>>  (1) substitute NEW for OLD
>>  and
>>  (2) swap/switch OLD for NEW,
>>  which involves, at the surface, switches in three
>>  places, holding only
>>  the preposition "for" constant. it is, of course,
>>  possible that
>>  blending takes place at a more abstract level of
>>  analysis, in which the
>>  allocation of OLD and NEW to syntactic arguments is
>>  separated from the
>>  choice of "for" as the oblique marker.
>>
>>  extensions of constructions to new head items
>>  semantically related to
>>  existing heads *could* always be analyzed as
>>  syntactic blends, with a
>>  certain amount of ingenuity (as above). but this
>>  seems to me like the
>>  wrong way to go, especially since people who produce
>>  these extensions
>>  so rarely treat them as inadvertent errors; in
>>  general, the extensions
>>  look like innovations in grammars, made
>>  independently by some number of
>>  speakers and then spread to other speakers by the
>>  usual means.
>>
>>  arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu
>>  __________________________________________________
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>
>
>=====
>James D. SMITH |If history teaches anything
>South SLC, UT |it is that we will be sued
>jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com |whether we act quickly and decisively
>|or slowly and cautiously.
>
>
>
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--
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



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