basketball --- (blend?)

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/21/2011 02:52 AM, ronbutters at AOL.COM wrote:
>"bigger" merely means "(more) important"--cf "Nobody makes more of
>the bigger shots." There are two kinds of shots: ordinary shots and
>bigger shots.

There must be three kinds -- what's the
superlative?  Tallest?  Loftiest?  Proudest?  Mega-?

Joel


>Sent from my iPad
>
>On Jan 20, 2011, at 10:26 PM, "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at MST.EDU> wrote:
>
> > Maybe this is a blend: "Nobody makes bigger shots than..." and
> "Nobody makes more big shots than..."
> > It's not entirely synonymous, but it may be close enough to have
> blended in the mind of the speaker.
> >
> > Gerald Cohen
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn, Thu
> 1/20/2011 8:47 AM
> >
> >
> > At 1:11 AM -0500 1/20/11, Victor Steinbok wrote:
> >> I can almost understand what the ESPN announcer was trying to say:
> >>
> >> "Nobody makes more bigger shots than Chauncy Billups."
> >>
> >> "More" and "bigger" are meant to be parallel, but it doesn't quite work.
> >> One reading would be [more [bigger shots]], but this begs for antecedent
> >> for "bigger"--bigger than what? Another reading is "more [and] bigger
> >> shots", but this is also odd. One thing that was /not/ implied was the
> >> nonstandard [[more bigger] shots]. The actual implication might have
> >> been something like, "No one makes more big shots /or/ bigger shots than
> >> Chauncy Billups." In other words, he makes a lot of very important
> >> shots. But the hyperbolic got lost somewhere in the comparative.
> >>
> >>    VS-)
> >>
> > Yes, these have been discussed somewhere among those examples of
> > "Escher sentences" that sound fine until you start to try to parse
> > them.  Here's a bit of discussion from Language Log on another
> > species of this genus:
> > http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000862.html
> > Arnold may be able to locate some discussion in the literature of the
> > Janus-scale comparatives like Victor's (or the related "Nobody makes
> > bigger shots more often than..."); I remember first hearing one from
> > Barbara Partee but I don't know if there's a write-up anywhere.
> >
> > LH
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> <http://www.americandialect.org/>
> >
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>
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