[Ads-l] sexist "crazy"

[Mark Mandel]

Hey, Arnold, a terminological question: what's wrong with "restrictive" and
"nonrestrictive"?

Mark

On Mar 23, 2016 4:20 AM, "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

> Throughout all of this discussion, Jon Lighter has insisted that "crazy
X" just means, and always means, 'X who is crazy', despite so many people's
clear perceptions that there are two different cases of "crazy X", which
"feel" quite different. Jon is insisting that all adjectival modification
is _subsective_, picking out a subset of the class of things denoted by the
head N that have the property denoted by the Adj. It is a very old
observation -- one that I have repeated in postings on Language Log and my
blog since 2007 -- that this is just wrong, that there are both subsective
and appositive modifying adjectives; in appositive modification, the
modifier denotes a property that holds for all (in a loose sense of "all")
of the things denoted by the head N.
>
>The textbook example is "the industrious Chinese", in contrasting cases
like "The industrious Chinese will advance in society, while the others
will fall by the wayside" (intersective) vs. "The industrious Chinese have
succeeded in transforming their country" (appositive: "all" the  Chinese
are industrious).
...

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