one-time "whenever", live

Alice Faber faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU
Sun Sep 2 03:46:34 UTC 2007


Laurence Horn wrote:
>> Laurence Horn wrote:
>>> Just listening to Red Sox 22-year-old rookie "phenom" [that's
>>> PHEE-nom] Clay Buchholz in his post-game interview after throwing a
>>> no-hitter in his second appearance in the major leagues.  He was
>>> asked about a great play behind him by second baseman Dustin Pedroia
>>> who took away what looked like a sure hit in the seventh inning and
>>> he responded along the lines of
>>>
>>> "Yeah, whenever he made that play I knew I had a shot [at the
>>> no-hitter]."
>>>
>>> Not surprisingly, he sounds Southern (to me), and sure enough his bio
>>> lists him as born in Nedarland, TX and as having attended Angelina
>>> JC, also in Texas.
>>>
>>> I've read about (and even written about) episodic "whatever", but
>>> I've never actually heard one live as far as I can remember.  Pretty
>>> neat!
>>
>> He had several of them, along with a few more normative "whatever"s.
>>
> Alice, do you remember the syntactic context better than I do?  I was
> so overwhelmed between the no-no and the episodic "whatever" that I
> didn't really catch them, except for (sort of) the one about the play
> when Tejada was robbed.  And I don't think any transcripts are
> provided of post-game interviews (and even if they were, they'd
> probably be "corrected").
>

The normative one was something like "whenever it's hit at Coco [Crisp],
he gets it".

The video of most of Buchholz' post-game remarks is up at www.nesn.com.
I caught three "whenevers" in the 4 minute sequence. Two are clearly
episodic, and one is ambiguous.

--
 =======================================================================
Alice Faber                                       faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                            tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                               fax (203) 865-8963

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