_Take_ v. _bring_

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 25, 2012, at 10:00 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 8:45 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> Well, "bring" is "cause to come", after all.
>

Binnick's point (and Fillmore had similar observations around 1970 or so, as Binnick acknowledged in that squib) was that idioms with "come" tend to sponsor corresponding idioms with "bring" (with a similar unpredictable meaning), which would support a lexical decomposition analysis, as favored by his mentor Jim McCawley.  Thus

come to / bring to (consciousness)
come around/bring around (to agreement)
come about/bring about
come down/bring down [remember the era!]
come forth/bring forth
come on/bring on (happen)
come out/bring out (e.g. a new edition)
come to grief, blows, etc./bring to grief/blows

and several others

They don't all work that way, though, e.g.:

*That brought him a cropper.
*She brought me off it.  (= got me to come off it, stop boasting)
The children {were brought up/*came up} well.

or several others

And, the era being what it was, we tended to ponder the mystery of why Chris could bring Robin off (or indeed bring himself/herself off), but Chris could not simply bring Robin (or bring himself/herself), on the intended sense.


> Isn't "cause to come" more transparently, _fetch_?
>

The OED gloss on "fetch":
To go in quest of, and convey or conduct back. The first part of the notion is often additionally expressed by go or come.
(So not quite interchangeable with "cause to come", and for me more likely when the fetcher is a dog and/or when the thing being brought couldn't have come on its own, often because of its inanimacy.)


> That meaning perhaps historically underlies the use of "fetching" in
> sentences like,
>
> "My! You look quite fetching, my dear!"
>

Etymologically for sure, but I'm not quite sure I can track the semantic shift, or predict why it's so often women that are fetching rather than men (or dogs).

LH

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