more astounding coordination

[Chris Waigl]

Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

>On Wed, 9 Nov 2005 15:43:43 -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
>>from David Fenton, on soc.motss, 11/9/05:
>
>
>>-----
>>Oberlin has legacies.
>>
>>Were I to have a child and sent the child to Oberlin, she would be a
>>legacy.
>>-----
>>
>>that counterfactual clause almost got past me, and then i had what
>>the Language Loggers call a WTF experience and realized that its two
>>parts were not a matched pair, the first part being an inverted
>>counterfactual clause, the second the VP of an ordinary counfactual
>>(with "if": "if I sent the child to Oberlin").  the full
>>counterfactual certainly could not have been
>>   *were I to have a child and sent I the child to Oberlin
>>   *were I to have a child and did I send the child to Oberlin
>>and even an uninverted second conjunct  (with a subject) is not
>>perfect, though it's a lot better than these:
>>   ?were I to have a child and I sent the child to Oberlin.  (1)
>>
>>to get fully parallel conjuncts, you need to use the ordinary
>>counterfactual in the first conjunct:
>>    if I were to have and child and (I) sent the child to Oberlin.
>>
>>
>
>One option you didn't mention:
>
>   were I to have a child and send the child to Oberlin
>
>That would be parallel ("were I to have" + "were I to send"). Were I to
>construct such a sentence and try to say it, that's how it would turn out.
>
>
>
This is how I read David Fenton's sentence when I first saw it (after
some wondering about his syntax).

Chris Waigl

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