Dan Everett: Unaccusatives and special meaning (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Well, Martha, pardon me then. As the Gilda Radner character on Saturday
Night Live used to say, 'Nevermind'. (Remember, when she argued in favor of
'violins on television')

-- DLE


----- Original Message -----
From: "Martha McGinnis" <mcginnis at ucalgary.ca>
To: <DM-LIST at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 8:27 PM
Subject: Martha McGinnis: Unaccusatives and special meaning (reply to Dan
Everett)


> I think Dan may have misread my message.  The examples I gave were
> supposed to be idiosyncratic uses.  The degree of idiosyncrasy varies
> a bit, as it does in the L&R examples: in "the sun rose", the sun
> really rises (in some naive-science sense); in "X's eyes popped",
> something really happens to X's eyes, though it's not clear that it's
> the usual sense of "popping"; in "the penny dropped," there are no
> pennies and no dropping, in the usual sense.  But yes, the whole
> point of my message was that these are intransitive phrasal idioms,
> whose idiomatic sense doesn't carry over to the transitive
> counterpart.
>
> >The first comment that comes to mind is that the examples Martha uses to
> >illustrate symmetry are all nonliteral, frequent but idiosyncratic
> >constructions that do not seem to generalize. It is unlikely that one
could
> >find similar examples with similar properties in other languages,
especially
> >nonIndo-European. And if one did, I suspect that they too would be
> >nonliteral and of little generality.
> >
> >But this gratuitous opinion of mine is not based on any research
whatsoever.
> >
> >DLE
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca