WONY (Word of NEXT Year)? Diavlog Revisited

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:03 PM -0500 12/23/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 12/23/2007 02:46 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>>On Dec 23, 2007, at 11:03 AM, Joel Berson wrote:
>>
>>>... Wasn't the word that prompted the "vl cluster spotting" chain
>>>"vlog"?  And no, I will refrain from telling you the various
>>>Dutch/Afrikaans words either.
>>
>>Joel, did you want to stick to the form of that last sentence?  if so,
>>what's the "either" doing?  (and the "no", for that matter?)

yes, I noticed those too...

>
>I cannot defend my last sentence strongly, you must excuse it as a
>non-peer-reviewed (until now!) email submission.  But to explain, the
>"no" and "either" were in response to the following sentence from
>Dennis Preston:
>>please don't write in and tell me about the "English" word
>>Vladivostok and other borrowed stuff)
>which I unfortunately snipped from my response.  (My "no" should
>probably have been "yes", but I think I had started my thinking with
>"no, I will not tell you ... ".

That was going to be my hypothesis, following Jespersen on blends (as
Bolinger or Jerry Cohen would call them) or "fusions" (as Jespersen
himself referred to them), e.g. in "I miss not seeing you" or other
instances of resumptive and sympathetic negation following verbs of
denial, doubting, hindering, forbidding, etc.) or in comparative
clauses.  Curiously (but not, I think, ironically), I was just
reading Jespersen on such constructions while trying to whip an ADS
paper into shape for the none-too-distant future.   Here it's "No, I
will not tell you either" + "I will refrain from telling you", or the
like.

LH

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