"certain" inThe First Noel

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Aug 2, 2007, at 9:59 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 12:43 PM -0400 8/2/07, Mark Mandel wrote:
>> Yup. It's a garden path sentence. The catch is that the obvious
>> interpretation of "The first Noel", as referring to the first
>> Christmas,
>> doesn't work. Instead, I take it as referring to the greeting: The
>> angels'
>> first Christmas greeting was uttered to certain poor shepherds.
>
> Ah, so you and dInIs are taking it as "The first
> Noël that the angels did say..."!  I always
> assumed the parenthetical reading as you describe
> it below, although as you convincingly argue this
> is indeed hard to sustain semantically.

well, the punctuation indicates a parenthetical.  unfortunately, the
carol is old enough to have a restrictive relative ("(that) the
angels did say") set off by commas, something we (mostly) don't do
any more.

arnold

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