"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
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