A trivial dialect conundrum

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Oct 5 01:30:13 UTC 2012


On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:13 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>   Both variants are ok, and _they might even be conveying slightly different things_ (with greater          > discourse salience of the one thing, with singular agreement, or of the reference class from which this > thing is drawn, with plural agreement).

I have that impression myself. But it's like a "floater" in the mind.
The difference is right there... until I try to focus on it. OTOH, the
plural version is, IMO, logically transparent.

But it's *still* "wrong." :-(

Thanks for the reminder and the refs, arnold.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list