guido guidette

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jan 25, 2010, at 6:15 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

> At 2:09 AM -0500 1/25/10, Seán Fitzpatrick wrote:
>> Not to mention this example of hypercorrection:
>> 'In any case, as Labov said on NPR a few years ago: “Whatever the
>> influence
>> of the mass media are, it doesn’t affect the way we speak every
>> day...."'
>>
>> Sean Fitzpatrick
>
> I don't think that's hypercorrection but
> agreement-with-the-closest; I'm sure Ben or
> Arnold can direct us to the relevant Language Log
> posts thereon.

agreement with the nearest is so routine that we haven't posted much
about it (concentrating instead on government by the nearest), though
we've posted about some special cases:

AZ, 1/27/05: Agreement with nearest always bad?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001846.html

AZ, 4/4/09: Agreement with disjunctive subjects:
  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1293

the more-or-less classic cases that give rise to AWN are: ordinary
postnominal modifiers, postnominal parentheticals, and coordinate
subjects.

arnold

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