defend = 'defend against'

[Laurence Horn]

It comes from Peirce's distinction of sign/symbol/icon within the semiotics of signifier/signified relations (I know, this sounds suspiciously postmodern, but it really isn't).  The icon is the one that bears a non-arbitrarily relation to what is signified.  For example, the relation between "long" and the property it stands for is arbitrary, and hence non-iconic, and ditto "cat" and felis domesticus.  But "meow" is at least partially iconic, as is saying "We went for a long, long, long, long walk" rather than "We went for a long walk".  Or "We went for a lo:::::ng walk" (with an elongated vowel).

LH

On Dec 13, 2012, at 12:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> OK, but what does "iconically" mean?
>
> "Recognizably"? "Typically"? "Commonly"? "As one would expect"? "Visually
> on a page"? (Obviously I doubt the last.)
>
> JL
>
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: defend = 'defend against'
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 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
>>>> -----------------------
>>>> 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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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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