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
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