[Ads-l] Prepositioning

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Jun 25 15:54:51 UTC 2015


I did notice (to the point of a double-take), but then wondered whether only linguists would have felt more comfortable with a hyphen after the prefix.

LH
> On Jun 25, 2015, at 11:51 AM, Barbara Need <bhneed at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> From Barbara Partee (on FB and LanguageLog):
> 
> Linguist reads the paper: First sentence in Friedman's column begins "Let’s see, America is prepositioning battle tanks …" and before I got to the battle tanks I was surprised and wondering how 'preposition' could be used as a verb and what it could mean. (I'm of course seeing the word that starts with 'prep', had to be garden-pathed before I backtracked and saw the verb pre-position.)
> 
> I won't be surprised if readers of this blog had a similar first parse of my header –  its occurrence in this blog will probably make that even more likely.
> 
> Thoughts?
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