A trivial dialect conundrum

[Joel S. Berson]

At 10/4/2012 09:30 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>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, what you need is a ref, who will tell you when you've committed a foul.

Joel


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