Jan Freeman on preposition dropping

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Sep 10 20:14:16 UTC 2007


I came across "apropos NP" in the yesterday's Sunday Times and then
lost it, damn it!

-Wilson

On 9/9/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Jan Freeman on preposition dropping
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Nice column today by Jan Freeman in The Globe about how Brits blame
> preposition dropping ("appeal/battle/protest against" -> trans.
> "appeal/battle/protest") on the Yanks:
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/09/yankees_win/
>
> It's a nice example of what Lynne Murphy recently dubbed British
> Verbal Superiority Complex (mirroring American Verbal Inferiority
> Complex):
>
> http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/09/diapers-nappies-and-verbal-inferiority.html
>
> On a side note, Jan's column refers to Arnold Zwicky's ADS-L
> discussion of "abscond (with)" last month. That's when the list was
> suffering from some weird posting behavior -- Arnold's post never
> showed up in the archive, even though it showed up in (some?)
> subscribers' mailboxes. My reply to Arnold's post did show up in the
> archive:
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0708B&L=ADS-L&P=27049
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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