[Lexicog] unlex-entries

[David Tuggy]

It's part of a family of families of interesting structures. E.g. "That
was the day I unyanked the television from the wall". I also have
collected usages of unfrayed, unfrazzle, unpeel, unrace, utterable,
unshovel; de-empty, dethaw, unthawed, unfrosted, unopen, unstraighten,
and (probably) others where words, many with a negative prefix like
"un-", wind up meaning the opposite of what you would have thought. Some
of these I have had multiple-y attested, and some seem standard for some
speakers. Standard for my wife, for instance, is the construction
exemplified in "I have really missed not seeing you." To me that would
only be appropriate when we have been together more than I wish.

Anyway, it's a fascinating can of worms to swim in. Some day I'll
probably write a paper...if I get lucky.

--David Tuggy

fieldworks_support at sil.org wrote:

>
> The number of usages that Mark Liberman has come up with seems impressive.
>
> But then I wonder, if you had an ungrammatical error that happened once
> every 1000 uses of a word or construction, after several years you could
> find a number of examples of the "incorrect" usage. Does this then make it
> correct?
>
> But to me there is a logic to this usage. What is meant here is "not
> unpacked", or "ununpacked". The double negation (which here makes sense)
> gets collapsed to a single negation, either because of the rules against
> double negation in English, or as a contraction "ununpacked" > "unpacked".
>
>
> Steve White, Jaars language software support
> 704-843-6337, 1-800-215-7813
>
>
>
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