defend = 'defend against'

[Jonathan Lighter]

Brevity for sure.  But I'm a bit behind the times. What does "iconically"
mean in this context?

JL

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: defend = 'defend against'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Dec 13, 2012, at 7:39 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
>
> > It may have something to do with people wanting to avoid prepositions
> > whenever they can. But why? To conserve planetary oxygen? Just a
> tentative
> > SWAG.
>
> i've posted a number of times on "transitivizing P-deletion", a syntactic
> development that potentially serves two purposes: (a) brevity; (b)
> indicating, iconically, a tighter sematic/pragmatic bond between verb and
> object than the P-marked variant does.
>
> arnold
>
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