defend = 'defend against'

[Laurence Horn]

On Dec 13, 2012, at 11:51 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

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

The closer the connection in form, the closer the connection in reality.  This is a standard take in certain varieties of cognitive linguistic analyses, especially in the work of John Haiman.

LH
>
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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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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>
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