Collegiate "geek" in the '70s (was Re: Synonymy avoidance)

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:29 AM -0500 3/11/05, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:13:14 -0500, Dennis R. Preston <preston at MSU.EDU>
>wrote:
>
>>The "exact synonymy" rule surely applies to varieties, not languages.
>>"Ya'll" and "you guys" appear to be exact synonyms in the fiction
>>called "English," but they don't co-exist in one brain (except for
>>bidialectal speakers), although bidialectal speakers are quick to
>>begin to make distinctions, as I do now for "greazy" and "greasy."
>>"Greazy" is really greasy, "greasy" is lightly and delicately oiled.
>
>Didn't Labov have an anecdote about one of his New York informants
>pointing out her small v[eys]es and large v[ahz]es?  Regional variants
>that ostensibly "mean the same thing" can always be reintensionalized (as
>the semanticists  might say) to mean different things within one speaker's
>dialect.
>
And in fact this process was first (to my knowledge) defined (as the
"law of differentiation") by the coiner of the term "semantics"
himself, Michel Bréal (_Semantics_, 1896, trans. 1900).

Larry