Quotative [to be] + "that"

[Jonathan Lighter]

I didn't mean to be insulting, Arnold, or to claim that my recollections trump yours, or to insist that this structure cannot exist.

My post simply expressed a measure of professional skepticism and offered a conceivable alternative hypothesis for your consideration.

JL





"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: Quotative [to be] + "that"
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On Mar 25, 2005, at 7:38 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> I agree with you in principle, Arnold, but the structure you're
> attempting to validate and explain seems to require many more exx. -
> particularly, as Peter says, plural exx. in a single discourse -
> simply to confirm its existence. Exx. of "is is" are everywhere in
> speech, but I'm not sure at all that the existence of this putative
> "new structure" is similarly well established.

exx. of "is is" are indeed everywhere in speech. but linguists have
denied this on the basis of their recollections. when pat mcconvell
reported examples of "is is" on the Linguist List, someone replied that
that might be so elsewhere but she'd never heard any such thing in
australian english, and mcconvell (an australian) noted that virtually
all his examples *were* from australian english, where the construction
could be heard all the time.

> Obviously there can be weird new developments in language that need
> explanation, and obviously they may spread slowly at first, like an
> epidemic, and then appear everywhere. But I think that this
> phenomenon needs to better substantiated.

jon, you have said that you'd never heard things -- well, that you
don't recall having heard things -- like plain-quotative BE ("She was,
'I have to go now' ") or plain-reportative BE ("She was that she'd have
to go then"), so you don't believe they exist. i have said that i've
seen a fair number of examples of the first and that i believed i'd
heard some of the second.

you seem to think that your recollections have priority over mine. i
find that insulting. you're telling me i'm making things up. i could
claim in response that you're listening with deaf ears.

yes, we need data, but why should you dismiss my recollections out of
hand? what am i, chopped liver?

i've tried to explain why i'm not leaping to scroll out dozens of
examples: i haven't been coding for these or specifically collecting
them and they can't be gotten in easy database searches, so we're
talking about a major investment of my time to find the examples. even
if i come across some more by accident, you won't accept them unless
there's a significant body of them.

i'm pretty sure they're out there. so we should be encouraging
researchers to look for them. you seem to be saying that you don't
think they're out there and won't even credit my perceptions unless i
myself can supply a body of evidence, now.

i agree that evidence is necessary. but i could ask *you* to show that
there are no examples in, say, two or three million words of
conversational spoken english. i'd be impressed by that. why don't
*you* get on the job?

arnold


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