[Ads-l] Prepositioning

[Joel Berson]

 I too had to re-read.  If I were writing this I would insert a hyphen, and I'm not a linguist.  But I would know enough to check with the OED, which seems to offer only the spelling with a hyphen.  (Although two of its quotations omit it.  One is "prepositioned", which is unlikely to be confused.  The other is U.S. News & World Rep.)


Joel

________________________________
 From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2015 11:54 AM
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Prepositioning
 

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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