basketball --- (blend?)

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

Why must there be three kinds if there are only two? Or if there are three the biggest are in a subset of the bigger.

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 21, 2011, at 11:26 AM, "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:

> 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
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> <http://www.americandialect.org/>
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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