"Something there is that doesn=?windows-1252?Q?=92t_?=love retroactivity."

[Laurence Horn]

On Jan 6, 2014, at 12:32 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> Now I am confused.
>
> What is your "source" that includes "There is something that doesn't love a
> wall"?

Source in the old transformational grammar sense, the way "Beans I like" has "I like beans" as a source, or the way "The duckling was killed by the farmer" has "The farmer killed the duckling" (ignoring the way tense etc. works), not in the literary sense, so roughly equivalent to the more basic counterpart or underlying form corresponding to a given marked construction. Sorry for being obscure.

LH
>
> Google says Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
>
> DanG
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 12:18 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:
>> =?windows-1252?Q?Re=3A_=22Something_there_is_that_doesn=92t_love?
>>              = =?windows-1252?Q?_retroactivity=2E=22?=
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> FWIW, I demur on the analysis.  As I said earlier, I think it's just
>> topicalization of an indefinite, rare but (as work by Prince, Ward, Birner,
>> Gundel et al shows) not unprecedented, even outside poetic contexts.  No
>> heavy NP shift since the relative clause in question ("that doesn't love a
>> wall") stays put, while its head is extracted (or lopped off and tossed
>> forward).  The source is "There is something that doesn't love a wall".
>> Note that your immediate source below is *really* awkward, much more so
>> than Frost's line.  Let a hundred analyses bloom.
>>
>> LH
>>
>> On Jan 6, 2014, at 11:57 AM, Neal Whitman wrote:
>>
>>> It's an allusion to the Robert Frost poem about walls, I assumed, and in
>>> the poem I figure Frost did it for metrical reasons. As for correctness,
>>> I take it to be a topicalization ("Something that doesn't love a wall,
>>> there is") combined with heavy NP shift. So technically correct, but
>>> awkward.
>>>
>>> Neal
>>>
>>> On 1/6/2014 10:45 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
>>>> Subject:
>> =?windows-1252?Q?=22Something_there_is_that_doesn=92t_love_retroa
>>>>              ctivit?= =?windows-1252?Q?y=2E=22?=
>>>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> I saw this today in the NYTimes:
>>>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/greenhouse-crack-cocaine-limbo.html
>>>>
>>>> It feels wrong to me, but I can't put my finger on it. Is it technically
>>>> correct, but too Yoda-like? Help, please.
>>>>
>>>> DanG
>>>>
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>
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