Watermelons are long to grow

Sat Aug 7 16:55:03 UTC 2010

I got this reply to my earlier post. As the sender didn't send it to the
list as a whole, I'll not say here who it was in case they would rather I
didn't, but the reply helps me to make my point better than (I think) I
originally did.

>I understood it was a way to say they "TAKE* *long to grow," just that the
>verb TAKE was elided to create a more mnemonic zeugma. But maybe it's too
>simplistic a reading.

I think this is true: it _is_ a way to say that watermelons take long to
grow, inasmuch as it means the same thing. But you wouldn't be able to use
'long' in a zeugma with (what looks and sounds like) a tough-movement
construction ('watermelons are dear to buy') if 'long' couldn't also be
used in a tough-movement construction. Zeugma like this is only permitted
between parallel constructions. Therefore, I think that the only reason I
can get that sense out of the words in the sentence is that the surface
construction, tough-movement, makes sense with 'long' in it; this is
surprising to me. Here's a more concise paragraph explaining my reasoning,
which has taken me a while to work out!

I think that the fact that 'Watermelons are ... long to grow' can be made
sense of, and that on the surface at least the construction looks like
tough-movement, is evidence that 'long' in the time sense is, or is
becoming, an adjective that can be used in a tough-movement construction.
This is surprising to me because, in my grammar, adjectives that can be
used in tough-movement are all capable of being used as predicate
adjectives ('The problem is DIFFICULT', 'Melons are DEAR') as well as
attributive ones ('It's a DIFFICULT problem', 'These are DEAR melons'). I
find 'long' as an attributive adjective completely acceptable, of course
('It took a LONG time'), but a bit questionable as a predicate adjective (?
'The time was LONG'). However, I think 'long' in that position 'ought to'
be acceptable, even if only poetically, because 'short' is acceptable
poetically in that sense ('Time is SHORT' is good poetically or for effect,
and of course 'It took a SHORT time' is fine in all senses).

I think that makes sense!

Damien

>On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Damien Hall <djh514 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Damien Hall <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK>
>> Subject:      Watermelons are long to grow
>>
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> A friend recently remarked
>>
>> 1) 'Watermelons are dear to buy and long to grow.'
>>
>> I have no problem, of course, with 'dear' (=BrE for 'expensive') in a
>> tough-movement construction like this, but 'long' struck me as strange.
>> It can be made to work, sort of, if you do some of the usual
>> paraphrasing:
>>
>> 2) a) 'Melons are dear to buy' (OK) > b) 'Buying melons is dear' (OK)
>>
>> 3) a) 'Melons are long to grow' > b) 'Growing melons is long'
>>
>> The two sentences in 3) are as OK as each other; if you can accept 3a),
>> you might be able to accept 3b) - and there's no reason why many
>> speakers of English couldn't accept 3b), it seems to me, since it's
>> surely the same construction as
>>
>> 4) 'Time is short!' (meaning: 'Let's do it now before it's too late!')
>>
>> Yet, probably because of the chain of reasoning that it's taken to
>> convince myself that 'Melons are long to grow' is formally acceptable
>> and 'should' sound right, 'Melons are long to grow' still sounds to me
>> like an innovative extension of a construction I know, as opposed to
>> something natural. I think it might well be to do with the different
>> semantics of 'dear', 'tough', 'easy', difficult', etc (the words that
>> usually undergo this sort of tough-movement transformation) on the one
>> hand, and 'long' (for time) on the other; but there my expertise stops.
>> I can't comment on the semantics at all.
>>
>> How does this sound to others, and can you explain it? It's hard to
>> Google (pardon the pun), of course, to see how common it is. The
>> commonness of 'time is short' is no gauge of the acceptability of this
>> construction, as it's a fixed phrase which you might use even if you
>> never used this construction anywhere else; If you Google 'time is long'
>> you get pages of false hits for things like 'the time is long overdue';
>> etc.
>>
>> Damien
>>
>> --
>> Damien Hall
>>
>> University of York
>> Department of Language and Linguistic Science
>> Heslington
>> YORK
>> YO10 5DD
>> UK
>>
>> Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
>>     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
>> Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673
>>
>> http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb
>>
>> http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm
>>
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>

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
Fax  +44 (0)1904 432673

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm

DISCLAIMER: http://www.york.ac.uk/docs/disclaimer/email.htm

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