[Lexicog] boring question

[David Tuggy]

There's something about the meaning of "bored/boring" that fits
especially well with the idea of continuation, on-going-ness, same-old
same-old, which might help explain why "boring" would overgeneralize at
the expense of "bored" rather than verce visa. "I'm bored" does not
(clearly) mean, like you might expect a past participial passive-like
verb to do, "I underwent an experience of boredom (and am now
experiencing the aftermath)", but "I am now experiencing an ongoing
state of boredom".

--David Tuggy

quinn at fas.harvard.edu wrote:

> Dia dhaoibh, a chairde!
>
> Well, I have noted that Indonesian-speaking students of English have an
> extremely difficult time consistently distinguishing "boring" from
> "bored",
> despite the fact that standard Indonesian at least clearly distinguishes
>
> bosan 'bored'
>
> from
>
> membosankan 'boring'
>
> There's your related pair: mem- being the so-called "active voice"
> prefix, -kan
> being an applicative/causative.
>
> Interestingly, "boring" also is a fairly popular loanword in
> colloquial speech,
> but evidently mostly used with the meaning of standard "bosan".  For
> example:
>
> Gue lagi bosen sih, karena....
> I'm bored, because....
>
> The interesting thing here is that *lagi* is something like a
> progressive aspect
> marker, so perhaps the use of bor-*ing* rather than bore*-d* has to do
> with some
> overgeneralizations in the mapping.  It could, of course, just be (and
> perhaps
> more likely be) that the term was borrowed whole hog, indifferently to its
> source-language morphology, but then as such, reanalyzed to parallel the
> nearest local equivalent, namely, bosan 'bored'.
>
> Incidentally, heretofore, I'd never heard anybody speaking Indonesian
> use the
> colloquial morphological equivalent of membosankan, i.e., ngebosenin,
> and was
> starting to think there might be something to that.  But conveniently
> I'm here
> for a wedding, and was just able to confirm that that usage is quite
> possible.
> A good reminder never to trust one's own warped impressions.  Of
> course now I'm
> wondering if it's only used with an animate/human agent, and not of,
> say, a
> film or book.  Such is lexicography, eh: always just that one more
> question to
> ask.
>
> Hope this is useful; till later, keep well.
>
> Sla/n,
> bhur gcara
>
> Quoting Melissa Axelrod <axelrod at unm.edu>:
>
> > Hi all-
> >   I'm interested in the relationships between sentences like 'I'm bored'
> > and 'It's boring (to me)'. Are these two sentences possible with
> > inflectionally related words in other languages as well? Also, I'm
> > interested in semantic extensions of 'boring'. In ASL, the sign can mean
> > not only 'bored/boring' but also 'yuck', 'no way' and 'I refuse to do
> > that'. Is that common in other languages as well?
> >   Thanks,
> >   Melissa
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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