on reversed "substitute" (intransitive version)

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 28, 2011, at 4:08 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> Clear but not transparent? A distinction I cannot as yet fathom.
> DanG
>
>
?
I wasn't trying to distinguish "clear" and "transparent", but rather what was/would have been transparent (or clear) to me on hearing/reading it and what must have clearly been intended by the speaker/writer, given the context.  What was not transparent to me is that "When you substitute him" could really mean "When you take him out and put in someone else" (as opposed to "When you put him in and take out someone else").  What is clear is that that's what the writer/speaker intended to convey, given the overall context.

This is a fact about the difference between the two dialects.  Before I became familiar with the British use of "knock up", if I had come across a female character in a movie or book saying to her male counterpart "Please knock me up in the morning" it would not have been transparent to me that she meant 'please awaken me in the morning by knocking', yet clearly, that's what she would have meant (especially if she had uttered it with a British accent).  Or perhaps a more natural example:  the first time I came across someone saying something like "If she was wearing her seatbelt she may have survived the accident", I could only interpret it as suggesting that the speaker was agnostic as to the subject's survival; to express the counterfactual, presupposing that she didn't survive, I would have expected "…she might have survived the accident".  But now I recognize that for the "new" dialect (don't know how new it actually is), "may" can be used to express this counterfactual !
 or subjunctive meaning as well.

Hope that's clearer and/or more transparent.

LH
>
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 6:38 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>> Reminds me; the original from Cris Carter was actually "When you substitute him", not "if".  Same difference as they say (but I usually don't).  For me, these are not at all transparent; I only process them as "If/When you substitute him (for someone else)", not "If/When you substitute (someone else for) him", although clearly it's the latter that was intended.
>>
>> LH
>>
>
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