stunning antedating

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Sun Mar 19 00:48:28 UTC 2006


On Mar 18, 2006, at 4:31 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> This sounds good to me, too, arnold. Is that what you mean by "a
> minority
> taste"? <har! har!>
>
>
> On 3/18/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> quoted Mark
> Twain:

>> "This was a touching allusion to his repeated assertions, made at
>> divers and sundry times during the past few years, that he was going
>> off immediately and commit suicide."
>> ------

most people, encountering examples like this, treat them like speech
errors, either unconsciously "correcting" them or noting their
oddness consciously (and classifying them as some sort of "failure of
parallelism").  but a minority (maybe as many as 20%) have no trouble
with them, even after reflection; yes, they're not formally parallel,
but for us GoToGo types, that's ok.

some of us GoToGo types are minorities in other senses, of course.

arnold

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